First Investigation & Arrest
First Investigation
The Indiana State Police (ISP) responded with over two dozen detectives, evidence technicians, and troopers to the very bloody crime scene. In the ensuring days, nineteen (19) people, some of whom weren’t even police officers, seized critical evidence, kept in at least four different locations without any accurate documentation and some of which was irretrievably lost.
The ISP lead detective, Sean Clemons, then came to his quick conclusion that Dave had murdered his family after the church ball games and in the process, staged a fake sexual attack on Kim, placed her shoes on top of the car, and then added a cleaning solution to her blood flow, all the while “manipulating” the crime scene to make it as though someone else had murdered his family.
Clemons, however, had made several false claims, including that Dave had left the ball games at 9:00 p.m., rather than the actual time of 9:22 p.m., when seven others were present with him. The detective had then claimed a neighbor had heard three "interpreted gunshots" around 9:15 p.m. from the Camm residence when that, too, had been a blatant falsehood.
Stites thought a cleaning solution caused the change in colors of the blood.
The Basis for the Arrest
Purported bloodstain expert and crime scene reconstructionist Rodney Englert. His claims and that of his protege Stites would shock many in the forensic world (courtesy of WDRB).
David Camm's booking photo @ the Floyd County Jail, New Albany, Indiana.
The detective's "facts" and conclusions were soon proven wrong, but not before a private bloodstain pattern expert/Crime Scene Investigator (CSI) had been called to the scene by the county prosecutor, Stan Faith.
That CSI was Robert Stites, a protege of Rodney Englert, supposedly an internationally renowned bloodstain expert. Examining Dave's clothes, including the T-shirt he had worn the evening when discovering his slain family, the CSI made a startling conclusion of the source of eight small dots of blood on the lower left front: “The tee shirt worn by David R. Camm…had high velocity blood mist, which occurs in the presence of gunshot at the time of the shooting.”
Not everyone thought Stites was an expert, including one of the ISP's own evidence techs who concluded, "The Son-of-a Bitch doesn't know what he's doing."
Indeed, part of his original claim was that the blood on the T-shirt came from Kim. In fact, it was Jill's.
Yet, with the bogus claims of Clemons and then the purported blood blowback on Dave's shirt, prosecutor Stan Faith quickly obtained an arrest warrant for Dave on October 1, 2000.
Faith then supplemented his lies to the public that the grieving father had three heinous motives to murder his family, as sliming Dave in the court of public opinion would now be an integral...and as it turned out, a very successful part...of the prosecutor's strategy.
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