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The Plate on the Floor: Why a Judge's Dinner Became a Murder Scene · Mystery Stories and Unsolved Cases

0:03
Speaker 1: At six fifteen in the morning on the tenth of
0:06
Speaker 1: April nineteen ninety one, a sixteen year old newspaper carrier
0:10
Speaker 1: named Jessica Cole pushed open an unlocked side door of
0:14
Speaker 1: the Barlow County court House in Crestfield, Ohio. She had
0:19
Speaker 1: done this dozens of times before. The building was quiet
0:22
Speaker 1: before dawn, and she liked cutting through the corridor to
0:25
Speaker 1: shorten her route. What she found stopped her. At the
0:29
Speaker 1: threshold of a judge's chambers, Eugene Hoffmann, fifty two years old,
0:33
Speaker 1: was slumped at his desk, the phone receiver rested on
0:37
Speaker 1: the blotter, off the hook, and on the floor. Just
0:40
Speaker 1: beside the desk sat a white china plate with a
0:43
Speaker 1: navy blue band around the rim, a linen napkin folded
0:47
Speaker 1: a silver butter knife. No food, nothing eaten, just a
0:52
Speaker 1: plate placed on the floor with deliberate care, as if
0:55
Speaker 1: some one had set it down quietly and never come
0:58
Speaker 1: back for it. The county coroner signed the death certificate
1:02
Speaker 1: ten days later. Cause of death hypertensive heart disease, natural causes.
1:08
Speaker 1: The file closed before the end of April. That plate
1:11
Speaker 1: would sit undisturbed in a police evidence log for eighteen
1:15
Speaker 1: years cataloged as a miscellaneous personal item of no investigative value,
1:20
Speaker 1: and the man who placed it there walked free, drove
1:23
Speaker 1: home that night, and kept practicing law for nearly two decades.
1:28
Speaker 1: This is the story of Judge Eugene Hoffman, and of
1:31
Speaker 1: the one detail that no one in nineteen ninety one
1:35
Speaker 1: stopped to ask about. Eugene Hoffman had spent eleven years
1:39
Speaker 1: on the Barlow County Common please Bench by the spring
1:42
Speaker 1: of nineteen ninety one. He was not a flashy figure.
1:46
Speaker 1: Colleagues described him as methodical, precise, the kind of man
1:50
Speaker 1: who returned every phone call before leaving the court house.
1:54
Speaker 1: He coached a youth baseball team on Saturday mornings. He
1:57
Speaker 1: kept a standing lunch with his younger brother ds on
2:00
Speaker 1: every few weeks at a diner off Route forty. He was,
2:05
Speaker 1: by every account, a man who did not leave loose ends.
2:09
Speaker 1: He had grown up in Crestfield, gone to the University
2:12
Speaker 1: of Akron for law school, and come back to the county.
2:15
Speaker 1: He knew the common Pleas Bench suited him. He understood
2:20
Speaker 1: the people who appeared before him, and understood that small
2:23
Speaker 1: counties have long memories. He was careful in his rulings.
2:27
Speaker 1: He was careful with his reputation. He was careful, it
2:31
Speaker 1: turns out, in ways that would only be understood long
2:35
Speaker 1: after he was dead. Norma Hoffmann, Eugene's wife, was fifty
2:40
Speaker 1: four years old in April of nineteen ninety one. She
2:45
Speaker 1: would later describe the evening of the ninth as unremarkable
2:48
Speaker 1: up to a point. Eugene had told her he was
2:51
Speaker 1: attending the Barlow County Bar Association dinner at Grange Hall
2:55
Speaker 1: that evening. He expected to be home by ten. When
2:59
Speaker 1: he was not, she assumed the dinner had run long.
3:03
Speaker 1: She went to sleep. She did not yet know that
3:06
Speaker 1: at eight thirty that evening, her husband had written two
3:09
Speaker 1: initials and a time into his desk calendar r W
3:14
Speaker 1: eight thirty pm Chambers. That appointment was written in Hoffman's
3:18
Speaker 1: own hand. A forensic document examiner confirmed it in court
3:22
Speaker 1: nineteen years later. Richard Weaver had known Eugene Hoffman since
3:26
Speaker 1: law school. They had shared office space in the mid
3:29
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties. They had co represented a client in a
3:33
Speaker 1: civil matter in nineteen eighty nine. On paper, they were
3:38
Speaker 1: colleagues from the same graduating circle, two men who had
3:41
Speaker 1: taken different professional paths, but stayed in the same orbit.
3:45
Speaker 1: Weaver went into private practice, Hoffman went to the bench.
3:50
Speaker 1: What did not appear on any letterhead was the forty
3:53
Speaker 1: thousand dollars Weaver had borrowed from Hoffman in nineteen eighty nine.
3:58
Speaker 1: It had never been repaired, and in the months before
4:02
Speaker 1: April of nineteen ninety one, Hoffman had begun drafting a
4:06
Speaker 1: formal complaint against Weaver with the Ohio State Bar. Weaver
4:10
Speaker 1: was aware of that complaint. The evidence assembled later made
4:14
Speaker 1: that clear. Inside Hoffman's chambers, investigators found a prescription bottle
4:19
Speaker 1: in the personal property inventory. The label indicated a refill
4:24
Speaker 1: date that, by the time of his death should have
4:27
Speaker 1: left no more than twelve tablets remaining. The count in
4:30
Speaker 1: the bottle was thirty one. A property clerk had noted
4:34
Speaker 1: the discrepancy with a handwritten question mark beside the number.
4:38
Speaker 1: No one followed up. No one asked what had happened
4:41
Speaker 1: to those missing pills, and because the coroner had already
4:44
Speaker 1: decided this was a heart not a crime scene, no
4:48
Speaker 1: one tested for anything. The standard panel did not include.
4:52
Speaker 1: Degoxen was not on the standard panel. The judge, who
4:55
Speaker 1: had spent eleven years presiding over other people's secrets, had
4:58
Speaker 1: been carrying one of his own in the last months
5:01
Speaker 1: of his life. Forty one letters written across six years
5:05
Speaker 1: from nineteen eighty five to nineteen ninety one survived him
5:09
Speaker 1: in the archived papers of a political science professor at
5:12
Speaker 1: Aldercroft University named Walter Chin. Hoffmann had written to Chin
5:17
Speaker 1: as a confidant, someone outside the county court House, someone
5:21
Speaker 1: outside the County court House, outside the social world Weaver inhabited.
5:26
Speaker 1: The letters were personal, discursive, the kind a careful man
5:30
Speaker 1: writes when he cannot say certain things out loud. Nine
5:34
Speaker 1: of the last fourteen letters covering the final fourteen months
5:38
Speaker 1: of Hoffman's life mentioned r W The anxiety in those
5:42
Speaker 1: letters builds in a way that is difficult to read
5:45
Speaker 1: even now. In February of nineteen ninety one, just two
5:49
Speaker 1: months before his death, Hoffman wrote, I am afraid of
5:53
Speaker 1: what he is willing to do. Walter Chin died before
5:56
Speaker 1: anyone found those letters. His papers were donated to Allcroft.
6:01
Speaker 1: They sat in archive boxes through two decades of university administration.
6:06
Speaker 1: They were opened by a research assistant named Meg Torrance
6:10
Speaker 1: in the spring of two thousand and nine, during a
6:13
Speaker 1: routine cataloging project. What she found there would eventually reach
6:17
Speaker 1: the desk of a cold case detective in Columbus, and
6:21
Speaker 1: everything that had been buried in Crestfield for eighteen years
6:25
Speaker 1: was about to move again. The letters reached Craig Ward's
6:28
Speaker 1: desk in Columbus in June of two thousand and nine.
6:31
Speaker 1: Ward was forty four years old and had spent the
6:34
Speaker 1: last three years working cold cases for the state. He
6:38
Speaker 1: read Torrance summary first, then the letters themselves, in order,
6:43
Speaker 1: beginning in nineteen eighty five. By the time he reached
6:46
Speaker 1: February of nineteen ninety one, he had already requested the
6:50
Speaker 1: original case file from Barlow County. What came back was thin,
6:54
Speaker 1: disturbingly thin. The original investigation had lasted less than three weeks.
7:00
Speaker 1: Detective Tombreck had been three months from retirement. His notes
7:04
Speaker 1: on the scene are methodical in some places and strikingly
7:08
Speaker 1: incurious in others. The plate on the floor, white with
7:12
Speaker 1: a navy band, a folded linen napkin, a silver butter knife,
7:17
Speaker 1: no food. Breck had logged it as a miscellaneous personal
7:20
Speaker 1: item of no evidentiary value. He had not asked Norma
7:25
Speaker 1: Hoffman whether it was hers he never did. Norma Hoffman
7:29
Speaker 1: was seventy years old when Ward called her in the
7:32
Speaker 1: spring of two thousand and nine. She still had boxes
7:35
Speaker 1: in her attic, the kind a careful woman keeps because
7:38
Speaker 1: she does not know what might matter. Later Ward drove
7:41
Speaker 1: to Crestfield and sat at her kitchen table. She made coffee.
7:45
Speaker 1: He asked about the plate. She had never seen it
7:48
Speaker 1: before in her life. That single answer reoriented everything. The
7:53
Speaker 1: plate had not come from the Hoffman household. It had
7:56
Speaker 1: come from somewhere else. And Ward already had a photograph
8:00
Speaker 1: taken at the bar Association dinner on the night of
8:03
Speaker 1: April ninth, nineteen ninety one, at Barlow County Grange Hall,
8:08
Speaker 1: six blocks from the courthouse. In that photograph, the tables
8:13
Speaker 1: are set with white plates, navy band identical. Someone had
8:18
Speaker 1: carried that plate from the grange hall to Eugene Hoffman's chambers.
8:21
Speaker 1: That night. Ward pulled the property inventory next the standard
8:26
Speaker 1: documentation for a scene treated as natural causes. Among the
8:30
Speaker 1: listed items a prescription bottle of dig oxen tablets belonging
8:35
Speaker 1: to Hoffmann, who had a documented history of mild cardiac arrhythmia.
8:40
Speaker 1: The inventory clerk had counted thirty one pills. Ward checked
8:44
Speaker 1: the prescription date and the refill schedule. By the ninth
8:48
Speaker 1: of April. The correct count in that bottle should have
8:52
Speaker 1: been no more than twelve. Nineteen pills were unaccounted for.
8:56
Speaker 1: The inventory clerk had noticed there was a handwritten question
8:59
Speaker 1: mark besides the number, a small hesitation mark from someone
9:02
Speaker 1: who caught the discrepancy and passed it up the chain.
9:06
Speaker 1: Nothing came back. The chain had already concluded natural causes
9:10
Speaker 1: hypertensive heart disease. The question mark had no destination. Ward
9:14
Speaker 1: sent the preserved tissue samples for retesting. The technology in
9:19
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one had not included digoxin on the standard
9:25
Speaker 1: toxicology panel. The omission was not unusual for the time.
9:29
Speaker 1: It was a gap in routine, not a cover up,
9:32
Speaker 1: But the samples had been preserved and in two thousand
9:35
Speaker 1: and nine the test could be run. The results came
9:39
Speaker 1: back in three weeks. Degoxin metabolites concentration consistent with acute
9:44
Speaker 1: toxic ingestion. Eugene Hoffmann had not died of his heart.
9:49
Speaker 1: He had been poisoned with a drug derived from his
9:52
Speaker 1: own prescription, in a dose large enough to stop him
9:55
Speaker 1: and for eighteen years the official record had called it natural.
10:00
Speaker 1: Ward now had the plate, he had the pill count,
10:03
Speaker 1: he had the tissue results, and he had forty one letters,
10:07
Speaker 1: nine of which pointed to some one Hoffman had feared,
10:10
Speaker 1: identified only as R W. And the final fourteen months
10:14
Speaker 1: of his life. He had one more thing in Norma
10:18
Speaker 1: Hoffman's boxes, among the documents she had preserved without knowing why,
10:23
Speaker 1: there was a promissory note Richard Weaver had borrowed forty
10:27
Speaker 1: thousand dollars from Eugene Hoffman in nineteen eighty nine. The
10:32
Speaker 1: debt had never been repaid. Clipped to it was a
10:35
Speaker 1: draft complaint, handwritten, never filed, that Hoffman had been preparing
10:39
Speaker 1: against Weaver with the Ohio State Bar at the time
10:43
Speaker 1: of his death, and in Hoffman's desk calendar on the
10:46
Speaker 1: page for April ninth, nineteen ninety one, in Hoffman's own
10:51
Speaker 1: hand R W eight thirty p. M. Chambers. War did
10:57
Speaker 1: not go to Weaver immediately. He spent two months building
11:01
Speaker 1: the perimeter of the case, first verifying each element against
11:05
Speaker 1: the others, looking for the place where his reconstruction might collapse.
11:10
Speaker 1: That is what experienced investigators do when a case is
11:13
Speaker 1: eighteen years cold. They do not move until the structure
11:16
Speaker 1: holds under pressure from every angle. The structure held, but
11:20
Speaker 1: there was a witness. Ward had not yet located. Susan
11:24
Speaker 1: Platt had been the event coordinator at the Grange hall
11:27
Speaker 1: on the night of the Bar Association dinner. She was
11:30
Speaker 1: in her mid fifties by two thousand and nine and
11:33
Speaker 1: living in Medina County. Ward found her through a chain
11:37
Speaker 1: of phone calls that took most of an afternoon. She
11:41
Speaker 1: remembered the dinner. She remembered it well, actually, because something
11:45
Speaker 1: had struck her as odd. At the end of the night,
11:48
Speaker 1: when she was doing the final count of china, a
11:51
Speaker 1: plate was missing. One plate. She had noted it, thought
11:55
Speaker 1: someone had broken something and not said so and let
11:58
Speaker 1: it go. Ward asked her had she seen anyone leave
12:02
Speaker 1: with a plate. There had been someone, a man. She
12:06
Speaker 1: had noticed because he was carrying the plate differently from
12:09
Speaker 1: how you carry something you have absent mindedly picked up.
12:12
Speaker 1: He carried it deliberately, she said, like he was taking
12:15
Speaker 1: it somewhere specific. She had assumed he was helping with
12:19
Speaker 1: clean up. Ward showed her a photographic line up she
12:22
Speaker 1: identified Richard Weaver. That was the moment the case sealed,
12:27
Speaker 1: not in the laboratory, not in the archive at Aldacroft.
12:30
Speaker 1: Here in a foam conversation with a woman who had
12:33
Speaker 1: spent eighteen years not knowing what she had seen. The
12:37
Speaker 1: plate had not been a random object. It had been
12:40
Speaker 1: a delivery vessel. Someone had taken food from the bar
12:44
Speaker 1: Association dinner six blocks away and brought it to the
12:47
Speaker 1: chambers of Eugene Hoffman, who had an appointment that night
12:51
Speaker 1: with r W at eight thirty. There is something that
12:54
Speaker 1: resists easy analysis about this sequence of events, the calendar
12:58
Speaker 1: entry in Hoffmann's own own hand, the appointment. He had
13:02
Speaker 1: apparently agreed to the fact that he sat across from
13:05
Speaker 1: Richard Weaver that night and accepted something to eat or
13:10
Speaker 1: drink without apparent alarm. Whatever fear Hoffman had expressed in
13:15
Speaker 1: his letters, he had not broken the relationship entirely. He
13:19
Speaker 1: had written r W into his calendar. He had let
13:23
Speaker 1: him in Ward arrested Richard Weaver in October of two
13:28
Speaker 1: thousand and nine. The trial began in August of twenty
13:31
Speaker 1: ten in Barlow County Common Pleas, the same courtroom where
13:35
Speaker 1: Eugene Hoffman had presided for eleven years. The symmetry was
13:39
Speaker 1: not lost on anyone who had followed the case. Weaver's
13:42
Speaker 1: defense had constructed a coherent argument. The promissory note proved
13:46
Speaker 1: a debt, not a motive for murder. The letters proved anxiety,
13:52
Speaker 1: not guilt. The calendar entry proved a meeting, not a crime.
13:56
Speaker 1: The plate connected Weaver to the dinner and the dinner
14:00
Speaker 1: to the building, but placed nothing in Hoffmann's coffee. The
14:04
Speaker 1: tissue results proved digoxin, they did not prove Weaver administered it.
14:09
Speaker 1: A man with a cardiac condition and a prescription bottle
14:12
Speaker 1: of digoxen in his own office might have, under certain pressures,
14:17
Speaker 1: taken too many of his own pills, or miscounted or
14:22
Speaker 1: refilled the bottle, and recorded it incorrectly. Each of those
14:25
Speaker 1: explanations tested against the evidence develops a crack picture the
14:30
Speaker 1: chambers on the night of April ninth, Hoffman sits at
14:34
Speaker 1: his desk. The light is on. Victor Plass sees it
14:37
Speaker 1: at nine point thirty from the custodial hallway below. There
14:40
Speaker 1: is no sign of forced entry to the building or
14:43
Speaker 1: to the office, no sign of struggle. The door was
14:47
Speaker 1: opened by someone Hoffman knew expected and admitted his own
14:52
Speaker 1: calendar tells you who that was. The missing pills are
14:55
Speaker 1: the harder problem for the defense. Nineteen pills unaccounted for
15:00
Speaker 1: with a question mark from a clerk who noticed digoxen
15:03
Speaker 1: toxicity from self administration, would require a person to take
15:07
Speaker 1: a dangerous multiple of their prescribed dose in a single
15:11
Speaker 1: evening while at work during an appointment, with no indication
15:15
Speaker 1: of distress documented anywhere in brext scene notes. The coroner
15:20
Speaker 1: found him in his chair, no vomiting, no disruption. The
15:24
Speaker 1: plate was on the floor. Weaver placed it there. That
15:28
Speaker 1: is the one element only a person present could have explained.
15:31
Speaker 1: A plate carried deliberately from the Grange hall, sat down
15:35
Speaker 1: on the floor of a dead man's office and left,
15:38
Speaker 1: not forgotten, not dropped. The linen napkin was still folded.
15:43
Speaker 1: The butter knife was parallel to the napkin's edge. Some
15:46
Speaker 1: one had set it down with intention. And on the
15:49
Speaker 1: fourth day of testimony, Richard Weaver stood and spoke. He
15:54
Speaker 1: said he had gone to the chambers that night. He
15:56
Speaker 1: had brought food from the dinner. While Hoffmann took a
15:59
Speaker 1: phone call, Weaver put something in the coffee. When Hoffman's
16:03
Speaker 1: breathing changed, Weaver set the plate on the floor. He waited.
16:07
Speaker 1: When he was certain he left. He offered no explanation
16:11
Speaker 1: for why he had finally said it. The jury deliberated
16:14
Speaker 1: for three hours. The verdict was guilty one count of
16:18
Speaker 1: aggravated murder, life without the possibility of parole. The case
16:22
Speaker 1: is closed by every formal measure. Richard Weaver entered the
16:27
Speaker 1: Ohio State prison system in the autumn of twenty ten.
16:31
Speaker 1: The Barlow County Common please Court, the same court room
16:35
Speaker 1: where Hoffman had presided for eleven years, recorded the sentence
16:39
Speaker 1: guilty of aggravated murder, life without the possibility of parole.
16:43
Speaker 1: No appeal overturned it. No appellate court disturbed the record.
16:48
Speaker 1: The man who poisoned a judge in that judge's own
16:51
Speaker 1: chambers is serving that sentence today. What remains open is
16:55
Speaker 1: a different kind of question. The Ohio State bar received
16:59
Speaker 1: the formal complaint Hoffman had been preparing when he died.
17:04
Speaker 1: That complaint, unfinished in nineteen ninety one, was read aloud
17:07
Speaker 1: in the twenty ten trial as evidence of motive. Weaver
17:12
Speaker 1: had never faced a disciplinary proceeding for the conduct. Hoffman documented.
17:16
Speaker 1: He had continued to practice law for nearly two more
17:19
Speaker 1: decades after Hoffman's death, the pattern that Detective Craig Ward
17:23
Speaker 1: assembled Mercer County in nineteen eighty two, Wayne County in
17:27
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty six was formally entered into Ohio Investigative Archives.
17:33
Speaker 1: Two men who died while filing complaints against Weaver. Both
17:38
Speaker 1: deaths classified as natural or indeterminate. Ward's review concluded that
17:42
Speaker 1: insufficient physical evidence survived to bring charges in either county.
17:47
Speaker 1: Those cases are not reopened. They are not closed either.
17:50
Speaker 1: They sit in a file that exists, at minimum as
17:54
Speaker 1: a record that someone looked. Norma Hoffmann was seventy two
17:57
Speaker 1: years old when she sat in the gallery during the trial.
18:00
Speaker 1: She had kept the cardboard boxes for eighteen years. The
18:04
Speaker 1: financial records, the personal correspondence, the details of a marriage
18:09
Speaker 1: and a career. She had not known in nineteen ninety
18:12
Speaker 1: one what any of it was worth. She kept it anyway.
18:16
Speaker 1: The Pagaret for forty thousand dollars, unsigned and unpaid was
18:21
Speaker 1: in one of those boxes. The letter from February of
18:24
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one, Eugene's words in his own hand, telling
18:29
Speaker 1: his brother Dawn that he was afraid of what Weaver
18:31
Speaker 1: was willing to do, was in one of those boxes.
18:35
Speaker 1: Don Hoffmann had died in a car accident in nineteen
18:39
Speaker 1: ninety six. He never knew that his brother's fear had
18:43
Speaker 1: been correct. Meg Torrean's catalog the Chin Archive. In the
18:46
Speaker 1: spring of two thousand and nine, without knowing where it
18:49
Speaker 1: would lead, she was processing the papers of a deceased
18:52
Speaker 1: political science professor. She found forty one letters written by
18:56
Speaker 1: a dead judge to his dead brother, letters that had
18:59
Speaker 1: served because an academic had thought them worth preserving. She
19:03
Speaker 1: flagged them because something in their final months sounded urgent.
19:07
Speaker 1: She was right ward arrested Weaver in October of two
19:12
Speaker 1: thousand and nine. Weaver had been practicing law for eighteen
19:16
Speaker 1: more years. In the interval every day of those eighteen years,
19:20
Speaker 1: the plate in the floor report had been sitting in
19:22
Speaker 1: a file marked closed. There is something in this case
19:25
Speaker 1: that does not resolve the way verdicts are. A judge
19:28
Speaker 1: died in his own court house on the night of
19:31
Speaker 1: April ninth, nineteen ninety one. The investigator who responded was
19:36
Speaker 1: three months from retirement. The coroner signed in natural causes
19:40
Speaker 1: certificate ten days later. The file closed before April ended,
19:45
Speaker 1: and for eighteen years no one looked again. What broke
19:48
Speaker 1: it open was not forensic technology deployed in real time.
19:53
Speaker 1: It was a sixteen year old girl who noticed a
19:55
Speaker 1: plate on the floor and said so in her statement.
19:58
Speaker 1: It was a custodian who remembered a light. It was
20:01
Speaker 1: a widow who kept boxes in a room and did
20:04
Speaker 1: not throw them away. It was a professor who thought
20:08
Speaker 1: the letters of a judge were worth archiving. It was
20:11
Speaker 1: an assistant cataloging papers who read the words carefully enough
20:16
Speaker 1: to feel that something was wrong. Craig Ward read all
20:20
Speaker 1: of it. In June of two thousand and nine, he
20:22
Speaker 1: ran the tissue samples. The digoxin was there, preserved in
20:26
Speaker 1: eighteen year old evidence waiting. The plate had been on
20:30
Speaker 1: the floor from the beginning, white blue band linen napkins
20:34
Speaker 1: still folded butter knife parallel to the napkin's edge. It
20:39
Speaker 1: was photographed, It was logged, a clerk wrote miscellaneous personal item,
20:45
Speaker 1: no probative value and moved on. That plate was the
20:49
Speaker 1: answer to the entire case, sitting in an evidence photograph
20:53
Speaker 1: inside a closed file inside a court house that had
20:56
Speaker 1: belonged to the man who was murdered there. Eugene Hoffmann
21:00
Speaker 1: spent the last months of his life, afraid of what
21:02
Speaker 1: a man was willing to do. He wrote that fear
21:05
Speaker 1: down in a letter to his brother. He put it
21:08
Speaker 1: in a calendar entry. He carried it into the chambers
21:11
Speaker 1: on the last night of his life, and he let
21:14
Speaker 1: the man in any way, because he could not have imagined,
21:17
Speaker 1: perhaps that it would go this far. He was wrong
21:20
Speaker 1: about that, and it cost him everything. The jury in
21:24
Speaker 1: Barlow County needed three hours, not three days, three hours
21:28
Speaker 1: to look at forty one letters, a calendar entry, a
21:32
Speaker 1: pill count with a question mark, a plate that did
21:35
Speaker 1: not belong to any member of the Hoffman family, and
21:38
Speaker 1: the Dick Jockson in the tissue samples that had been
21:40
Speaker 1: sitting in a preservative jar for eighteen years. Richard Weaver
21:44
Speaker 1: is in prison. Eugene Hoffman has been dead for more
21:47
Speaker 1: than eighteen years. Don Hoffman never knew Norma Hoffman kept
21:53
Speaker 1: the boxes. The only reason any of this was ever
21:57
Speaker 1: resolved is that ordinary people doing ordinary work paid attention.
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