In the small town of Escondido California on a January morning, the Crowe family woke up to find their daughter, Stephanie, laying in the doorway of her bedroom brutally stabbed to death. But who would do this to such a sweet, innocent young girl? Was it her brother and his two friends motivated by sibling jealousy and influenced by dark video games? Or was it the unstable transient seen wandering near the home that night? The evening before was a normal one for the Crowe family. Michael, Stephanie’s brother, and Stephanie settled in watching television “Home Improvement” in the living room with their grandma. Eventually their grandmother went into her room. Next to go to bed was Stephanie, by this point her father was already asleep and her mother in bed reading. The time was about 9:30. By 10 the entire house was asleep. When the alarm sounded the family soon realized what had happened to Stephanie; leaving them in complete and total distress. Police acted quickly and after taking the entire family down to the station for questioning they picked up one Richard Tuite. Tuite is a mentally unstable man who was wandering around the area of the Crowes neighborhood the night of the murder knocking on doors. Tuite had a history of arrests mostly relating to narcotics. After being finger printed he was then released because no hard evidence was found to connect him to the murder. Attention soon turned to the family and friends of the son Michael where some interesting evidence turned up. The motive for killing Stephanie varied within the main suspects. The suspects were Richard Tuite and the team of Michael Crowe, Joshua Treadway, and Aaron Houser. Richard Tuite was in the neighborhood of the Crowes the night of the murder. The two house owners to the right and left of the Crowes said that the older mentally unstable man knocked on their door. Sheldon Homa said that Tuite was looking in his windows and eventually knocking on the door asking for someone named Tracy. Tuite then wandered to the home of Dannette Mogelinski asking the same questions. After finding no signs of Tracy, Tuite moved on. He then moved on to the other side of the street in search of this then unknown Tracy. He knocked on the door of Patrick and Misty Green and then to Gary West asking the same questions. West was the Crowes immediate neighbor. West called the police in fear of Richard Tuite. An officer drove down the street and saw no sign of Tuite but what he did see was the side door of the Crowes home closing from the inside. This happened around 9:40pm. Half after midnight neighbors said they spotted Tuite standing in the middle of the driveway staring at the Crowes house. In the morning Tuite was picked up and analyzed for evidence. He went willingly and also said he was willing to help out. Cuts and scrapes were found on his hands which could be wounds from the defensive fighting of the victim. A couple interesting things were found with the clothes of Tuite. First a cough drop wrapper was found in the pocket of his shirt matching the cough drops that were in a bowl on the Crowes kitchen counter. Also found on his red shirt were blood stains matching the blood of Stephanie Crowe. After looking further into Richard Tuite the investigation led to trying to find the mysterious “Tracy”. Tracy was found, she was Tuite’s ex-girlfriend. She was interviewed by police. They had been close due to the fact that they were both extreme drug addicts. Maybe Tuite could have possibly been high and mistaken her for Stephanie. Michael Crowe had the motive of the jealous sibling. The night of the murder Michael was the last to go to bed. He also claimed to get Advil around 4:30am which was in the kitchen. He would have left his room which is right across from where his sister’s body lay dead. This means by some miracle he passed the body twice and did not see her or he did not wake up and left his room, or maybe even saw her bloody and beaten and did nothing about it. As a suspect the next morning the case against Michael grew stronger as he, shown on video, was preoccupied playing a handheld video game while his family huddled together and cried over the loss of Stephanie. Michael was questioned for hours alone in which he confessed. He mentioned the names of two “accomplices” Joshua Treadway and Aaron Houser. The reason for Michael confessing was because he was verbally attacked by professional interrogators. For a 15 year old boy who just lost his sister he could have very easily been forced to tell something that is not true. The two friends, Treadway and Houser were then brought in and also questioned for extensive periods of time. During the interrogation of the friends Treadway also confessed to the murder saying he was just helping out a friend. He specifically told the detectives that he was on lookout. He claims later that he was bribed into confessing. Houser never confesses but after a routine search of his room they find a collection of knives, one of which was found at the Crowe household. Later Steve Crowe was told he was not allowed to see his kids even after demanding he had to. They went two days apart in which Michael was questions for a majority of that time. Many believe that the way the police interrogated Michael was seen by some to be too aggressive and unethical, and it could have been handled in a better way. During the night of the murder police were called at 9:40pm to the street of the Crowe’s after a complaint of a man wandering around knocking on doors who ended up being Richard Tuite. The policeman said he did not see any man walking around but did see someone walking into a side door of the Crowe household that was said to maybe be unlocked. Knowing this information, the police should have further investigated that. After the murder the police used a rare form of blood detecting using the chemical fluorescein. Escondido was the first to use this method, and the test’s accuracy in this investigation is questionable because the method does not work as well normal conventional techniques. Richard Tuite is responsible for the murder of Stephanie Crowe. I believe that he found his way to the Crowe household in pursuit of his ex Tracy. He looked in the windows of the house and mistook Stephanie for Tracy, walked in the unlocked door and stabbed her. This is more than reasonable, since Tuite was an unstable drug addict – the guy was crazy and he had been looking in neighbors’ windows and going up to their doors that night. In addition, the blood on his sweatshirt and the cough drop wrapper link him more concretely to Stephanie. The investigation of Michael and the other boys was vigorous, and in their shocked mental state after finding the young girl to be murdered, it is reasonable to say that the confession was not true. If the Escondido police would have put more time and effort into investigating Tuite from the start, they would have seen this sooner.