A former Illinois State Police investigator testified that police overlooked evidence in the case of a father accused of shooting to death his wife and three children.
Chris Vaughn is accused of murdering his family in a Ford Expedition after pulling off the side of Interstate 55 on the way to Oswego in 2007.
The investigator, Sgt. Robert Deel, said crime scene investigators displayed gross negligence for overlooking bullet trajectory evidence that points toward Vaughn's wife as the shooter, according to the Chicago Tribune. Vaughn was shot in the leg during the 2007 incident and contends that his wife was the shooter in a murder-suicide situation.
Investigators said they thought Vaughn pulled over, retrieved a hand gun from the vehicle's roof rack, wrapped it in his fleece jacked, and proceeded to shoot his wife in the head and then trained the gun on his children, ages 12, 11 and 8.
Deel said investigators ignored his findings.
"I wasn't being listened to by them," he said. "In fact, every time that I offered up something that was contrary to what they said, they had some reason why I didn't know what I was talking about, and basically it all fell back on that Christopher Vaughn is a criminal mastermind and he knows all about crime scenes and that he would be able to fool me into thinking that something else happened."
Deel's testimony, however, comes with it's own red flags.
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He was the investigator on the 2004 death of Drew Peterson's wife Kathleen Savio. Following that investigation, Will County prosecutors asked that Deel never be assigned as a crime scene investigator in their county again.
