Yeah, no shit. My little sister was at UT at the time of the murders and worked two jobs - at Jazzercize and across the street at that ICBY shop. She was scheduled to work that Friday night, but asked for the night off to attend a K98 promotional dance team tryout. APD had failed to interview her in the weeks that followed, and I called them to ask them WTF kind of an investigation they were running if they were not interviewing people that worked there at the time. Months passed before APD called me back. When they finally did, they wanted to interview me. I agreed.
After an hour of being grilled by homocide detectives with questions like "we know it was you, but we want to know who was with you", I was in tears, and snapped. I stood up from my chair and started screaming at them how fucked they were accusing citizens trying to help solve the crime, that they clearly had no fucking clue, and were never going to solve the murders, and ordered them to fuck off and arrest me or let me leave. The APD psychologist in the room stood up and finally said she believed me and I could leave, but they were going to call my girlfriend, who lived with her parents, and check my alibi. I honestly had no idea where I was that night, but I was sure I was with her on any given Friday night. Her Mormon mother answered the phone when APD called, and she told them she keeps a detailed journal, and I was with her daughter at a church dance with 100 witneses at the time of the murders.
It scarred me and my family. I've told that story to more than one judge over the years when asked for trial duty voire dire if I had any reason to not trust APD. I would later learn that APD conducted hundreds of such interviews with many that included torturing subjects with pepper spray, pointing pistols at their head, etc. In fairness, APD was under extreme pressure to solve the murders and were left with very little evidence after the fire and water damage to the crime scene. But that does not excuse the fucked up investigation they conducted and how it shaped my fucked up view of LEO.
I'm old now with teens of my own working in the immediate area and my thoughts go back to the families of the murdered girls and the justice denied to them 27 years and counting. Fucking tragic not cool story, bro.