On the last day of hunting season, a young woman was killed while walking her dogs in the woods. Police assumed it was an accident. But a handwriting analysis, a ballistic test, and an unusual physics experiment led investigators to ask the question, just what was the hunter's target?
Music The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is 16,000 square miles of sparsely populated woodland. It's quiet and usually safe. I would think if someone had a bicycle stolen it would make the front page of the newspaper.
Here, residents have more trouble with hunters than with criminals. My daughter-in-law was hanging clothes one day, and bullets were just whizzing by her as she was hanging clothes, and it wasn't even deer season. On the last day of deer hunting in 1992, Judy Blake Moilinen went for a walk in the woods with her five dogs.
Eventually, the dogs returned home, but Judy did not. Judy's mother and a neighbor went looking for her. and found her on one of the trails in the woods. 707, 05, heavy hunt accident at the end of Cherry Lane off of M38.
Judy was dead from a gunshot wound to the chest. It appeared to be an accident. Somebody called me. They told me about it. Well, my stomach just sunk to the floor.
Felt like it. I said, oh my god, no. Bullets from high-powered rifles can often travel three miles or more. And every now and then, one comes down in the wrong place. Neighbors said they heard a rifle shot just after 2 PM.
The investigation was hindered because The bullet that killed Judy could not be found in the brush. There wasn't any bullet. I did find an older bullet, and it was underground, and it was slightly corroded, and that was turned over, but it was determined that it was probably not the... projector they were looking for. But they did find evidence of where it hit after killing Judy.
I think they noted that that particular night was a blaze mark or a scar that a bullet might have made on a nearby tree. Judy had been married to her husband, Bruce, for 14 years, and they had a three-year-old daughter. Bruce worked as an insurance adjuster, and he said he had an alibi for the day of the accident. He came up with somewhere around 28 different individuals that he thought might be able to produce alibi for him on that day. Starting at about 8 o'clock in the morning and going all the way till 6, 6.30 at night.
Bruce was angry that his wife wasn't more careful. And he was more or less critical of his wife. for not wearing orange that day when she went in the woods. To me, I thought this was way out of character for this type of situation. Bruce made several more unusual statements about his wife.
And investigators were starting to wonder whether Judy's death was really an accident. Within days of Judy Marlinan's funeral, several friends noticed that her husband was behaving strangely. One said he made sexual advances towards her. Asking me if I wanted to live with him and asking me if we could be more than just friends and those types of things, it was like, my God, your wife hasn't even been dead for....
A couple weeks and he's... saying these things, you know. And there was another bizarre incident.
After the funeral, Bruce gave some of Judy's clothing to another friend, Gail Lampinen. And among the clothes was a letter. It's addressed to her, and it's allegedly from the victim, Judy Moylan, and signed Jude's, which was Judy's very personal nickname.
And Judy did not know Gail very well. She only had met her in passing, like, once or twice. When I read the letter, I was like, letter I said in the kitchen I think my first thoughts were what the heck is this and it basically said I'm having problems in my marriage Bruce and I have growing apart he's got his things I've got mine please help him find you know somebody else one of those those things and and for me the kicker was the PS line which was but he's great in the sack and just thought it was bizarre that he would be writing a little something like this Gail told police Bruce behaved inappropriately towards her in the months leading up to Judy's death. Bruce really turned up the heat and he was becoming a stalker is what it boiled down to.
Well, he started coming over here and calling the telephone a lot and invited us to go skiing or do different things and we wouldn't go with him. We were finding out that there may be a little bit more to Bruce Moylan than what his family knew about. To see if the letter was authentic, police took it to a forensic document examiner.
And I was asked to compare the... to known handwriting samples of Judy Moylan. Stegall noted that the handwriting was slow and deliberate.
Well, that's an indication that the document could be a forgery. Someone's attempting to either disguise their writing or simulate the writing of another individual. There were several characteristics inconsistent with Judy's known handwriting samples.
In the known handwriting sample of Judy, the end part of the T is a round bowl. Of course, it almost looks like a B. And over in the question sample, there is a complete separation between the T and the H. There isn't that bowl formation, and it has a very short T crossing. It lacked all of her individual habits, the way she formed her letters, the way she connected her letters, the ending strokes, the crossing.
and the T's the directions of strokes. The letter was a forgery. When someone writes on a piece of paper, it leaves indentations on the page underneath, which will hold more of an electrical charge than the other paper fibers.
So Steggall placed a thin piece of plastic mylar over the letter, then used an electric wand to create an electrostatic charge. So then we take a toner and sprinkle over the top of the mylar surface, and those areas that have the greatest charge will draw that black powder or toner to that area and develops an image. This revealed someone practiced writing an earlier version of this letter on the page above this one, which is common in forgeries. Stegall compared the letter to Bruce's known handwriting samples and concluded he had written the letter.
To think that some guy would be so bold as to write this and attribute it to his wife after she'd been killed in a hunting accident. I didn't think about it because the person that I knew, I didn't think he was capable of doing something like that. And investigators discovered something else. Just one year earlier, Judy was hit on the head by a large chimney block that accidentally slid off the roof while Bruce was on the roof repairing it.
And that accident darn near took Judy's life. She was lucky that she survived it. Another time, a fire broke out at the Moilanen's home while Judy was home alone sleeping. Fortunately, she woke up in time to call the fire department. department.
But she kept that quiet. She only told, I think, one or two people about that. It was just weird. And again, weird doesn't equal guilty, but it certainly lays the foundation for murder and motive.
And Judy had over $300,000 worth of life insurance when she died. In 1992, here in the U.P., it's a lot of money. Bruce also told Gail about the insurance money and what she described as his clumsy attempts to seduce her.
A lot of times he would try to tell me that he was going to be financially wealthy to the point that he could quit his job and just work with his animals. It didn't take us long to know something just wasn't right. This wasn't just an accident. That may have been the understatement of the year. She was somebody who very much cared about other people and would do anything for you if she could.
When 35-year-old Judy Marlin was killed in a freak hunting accident, her husband Bruce had an alibi for the entire day. But police found a witness who reported seeing Bruce out hunting that day alone, which contradicted his alibi. He had people that he claimed saw him around 2.30, 2.15 in the afternoon. But when you get right down to interviewing these people, some of them couldn't even substantiate that they saw him. He could not cover a time when he was in the woods, and there was no witnesses that could say where he was at that time.
To determine whether this was an accident or murder, police needed to find the fatal bullet. It was still somewhere in the woods, but police couldn't find it. Investigators found what looked like a scrape mark on a tree about 40 feet away from where they found Judy's body. Scientists applied sodium ridizinate, a chemical which turns purple in the presence of lead.
The mark tested positive, indicating it was struck by a bullet. For weeks, Dan Castle tried to find the bullet with his metal detector, but each time came up empty. Well, I knew the bullet was out there.
It just, I was searching in the wrong area. And it was kind of getting to me. I know that the weather was going to change. We were supposed to get a lot of cold weather and snow.
Finally, he decided to try a novel experiment using a slingshot to recreate the trajectory of the bullet. He knew where Judy was standing when hit and where the bullet had hit the tree. So he fired marbles at the tree from the same trajectory angle of the fatal bullet.
So I tried to hit it near the same location as the bullet did, and I heard them ricocheting off the branches and leaves and so forth in their woods. One of the marbles that struck the tree ricocheted almost at a right angle, somewhere, as I recall, 80, 85 feet away from the tree. And when Castle looked around that area, he found the bullet. It was just a fluke. I didn't know.
I was kind of at wit's end. To me, this was remarkable, to have him think of this, to what test could you do out in the woods to try to determine where a bullet might go after it struck a tree. Ray Kenney, a firearms examiner with the Michigan State Police, analyzed it to see if this was the bullet that killed Judy Moilinen.
The copper jacket was damaged, which wasn't unusual. But he found some important evidence trapped inside. I pried back the mushroom area of the bullet and collected all this material.
There was woody, fibrous material. Forensic scientists finally had something. It was the same wood and moss found on the tree with the scrape mark. And there was more evidence.
in the bullet. There was some other little like fibers, and there was a very tiny pink fiber that I could see. The pink cotton fiber was microscopically similar to the shirt Judy was wearing.
They also found a black fiber and a feather fragment in the bullet. Black fiber was similar to the black fibers of the jacket, and the feather fragment was similar to the down feathers that were found in the lining of the victim's jacket. There was no doubt that this was the bullet that killed Judy Moilinen. It was a.30 caliber round.
That was an incredible break in the case. And that's one thing they didn't tell Moylan in the head for a long, long time. He had no clue that they had the bullet.
Investigators researched all of the rifles that could have fired this round and identified four possible manufacturers. Bruce Moylan denied owning any of these rifles. But in the couple's financial records were loan papers of a recent bank loan, and Bruce's gun collection was listed as collateral.
We found an asset list in which listed a gun he failed to disclose to us, a.30-06 Savage 110, a rifle with a scope, and that was consistent with one of the weapons that could have shot that bullet. So that right there was key to us. Bruce was hunting, but he wasn't hunting deer.
He was hunting for his wife. Prosecutors believe Bruce Moilanen tried once before to kill his wife. A year earlier, while Bruce was on his roof making chimney repairs, a cement block mysteriously fell, hitting Judy on the head. Judy survived the incident.
And they also believe Bruce started the suspicious house fire as another attempt on Judy's life. It's really mind-boggling that this guy could do something like that with his wife and his infant daughter sleeping in the house. Prosecutors say Bruce waited until hunting season for his next attempt, and he hid in the woods waiting for Judy to walk the dogs.
The bullet went through Judy's down vest, her red cotton shirt, then hit a tree and ricocheted into the woods. Even as an experienced hunter, Bruce probably never imagined that he would be so close to the bullet. imagined that someone with a slingshot would find the bullet in the dirt, snow, and leaves. Since investigators couldn't find the murder weapon in Bruce's home, they believe he disposed of it somewhere before heading home. With Judy dead and $300,000 coming from her life insurance policies, Bruce continued to pursue Gail Lampinen, even though she was married and had shown no interest.
Bruce decided to write her a letter and to make it look like Judy had written it before she died. He added the unusual postscript telling Gail about his sexual prowess. The electrostatic analysis shows that Bruce wrote an earlier version of the letter, possibly as practice to mimic Judy's handwriting.
But it didn't fool the forensic document examiner. It's not possible to simulate someone else's handwriting 100%. You can interject some of their handwriting habits, but some of your own are going to appear.
I feel his real motive... was Gail Lampinen. Bruce felt that if he could get rid of Judy, that he was going to be able to sweep Gail off her feet and go off, and they were going to be happily together forever. BANG!
During a police interview, they confronted Bruce with the forensic evidence. They made it clear that Gail Lampinen wanted nothing to do with him, and that she knew from the start that the letter was a forgery. At that point, Bruce confessed.
Pops introduced the fact that Gail Lampinen had been working with him. And I think that it was an emotional crusher for him. And I think that that broke him down.
We had no interest. We had no interest in doing things with him. We had our own life. And we just thought the more we would ignore him, he'd go away. But he didn't go away.
Bruce said he threw the rifle in a nearby river, although police couldn't find it. Bruce was able to correct a mistake in the medical examiner's report. Bruce informed me that we were wrong on part of our evidence, that we thought that Judy had been shot in the left side, when in fact she had been shot in the right side of her chest, exiting out of the left side.
I felt that that was a key to his confession, because he was telling us something that only the person who was there doing the shooting could know. He also revealed his motive. What's everybody's motive for murder? I think it comes down to money, you know, greed.
He had $320,000 worth of life insurance on his wife. He said that Judy was a tyrant at work, and she was a tyrant at home. He said she was a bad cook, and he ended up doing most of the cooking. He told us that he didn't want to go through a divorce because Judy would get half of everything, and he didn't want to give up his assets. And that was Bruce's downfall.
He was cheap. Bruce Marlinan was arrested and charged with premeditated murder. Despite his confession, he pleaded not guilty at the trial.
He made an excuse for the confession, and basically it was, you know, psychologically coerced. He was tired. And you will hear how he took that gun, and he scoped her and pulled the trigger that caused the bullet to kill Judy Moylan instantly. Prosecutors showed the jury this police recreation of the cinder block incident.
Bruce claimed he accidentally knocked... the cinder block off the roof with his foot. The recreation showed this was impossible, that it required a deliberate push. But the forensic evidence was more than enough. Bruce Moilinen was found guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.
Everything just fit together and again in a very sad situation for a family but at least we were able to give them closure and a sense of justice and I hope that they have that today. I feel the forensic evidence was extremely important. I don't think we would have had enough information to break Bruce down without that type of evidence.
I think that he just thought he was so much smarter than these, quote, backwoods, unquote, cops could possibly be, that these guys couldn't be that smart. Turned out they were just a whole lot smarter than he was.