A new look at a 1993 Missouri cold case caught a suspect making incriminating comments when police left a room during an interrogation in 2015.
As the detectives walked away and closed the door, Loril Harp was seen talking to himself and chatting on the phone, saying things like, “I’m not under arrest, but I probably will be before I get out of here.”
At the time, he was being questioned about the shooting death of Steven Weltig, a 40-year-old liquor store owner in Arnold, Missouri.
Corporal Brett Ackermann and Detective. Corporal Josh Wineinger revisited the case in 2020, including a multi-hour review of the 2015 interview.
That’s when they noticed Harp talking to himself.
In one of the seven videos, which Fox News Digital obtained and reviewed through a public records request, Harp curses at a woman.
In another, he yells at himself and says he didn’t kill Weltig.
He moved constantly, shifting in his chair and tapping his feet.
“Seeing that timeout helped us,” Wineinger told FOX 2 St. Louis during an on-camera interview.
“At that point I was 100 percent convinced.”
Ackermann pointed to a phone call Harp made when no one was in the room and paraphrased the conversation.
“He was talking on the phone to someone who told him, ‘I’m going to go to jail.’ Things that would indicate that he was guilty of this,” Ackermann said.
That was enough for detectives to bring Harp back for questioning in 2020, when he was 68 and in declining health.
A new look at a 1993 Missouri cold case caught a suspect making incriminating comments when police left a room during an interrogation in 2015. Arnold Police Department
He dodged questions, played dumb and was evasive for more than three hours of a three-and-a-half-hour interview, which was recorded on audio tape and shared with Fox News Digital through a public records request.
Toward the end of the interview, Ackermann told Harp that they knew he was in the store at the time of Weltig’s death and that they knew a gun was fired.
They needed to know how.
“How did it happen?” Ackermann asked Harp.
“How did it happen that (Weltig) received a bullet hole in the head? And you’re the only other person there, Loril?
As the detectives walked away and closed the door, Loril Harp was seen talking to himself and chatting on the phone, saying things like, “I’m not under arrest, but I probably will be before I get out of here.” Fox News
He denied shooting Weltig twice and claimed Weltig attacked him with a gun.
Harp began to describe the altercation and then paused momentarily.
“Keep going,” Ackermann said.
“I grabbed his hand and hit him until he dropped the gun. And then I hit him again and then I ran out the door,” Harp said.
Stay up to date with today’s most important news
Stay up to date on the latest with Evening Update.
“I hurt him. I know I hurt him. Like I said, I fight. I hit him fucking hard. But I didn’t shoot him.”
The shooter used the side door of the store to escape, so the detectives’ ears perked up when Harp mentioned the side door.
They asked him what he did when he got home.
“I took a shower and I had a lot of blood,” Harp told Arnold detectives.
One of the detectives repeated what he had said.
“Did you have blood on you?” the detective asked.
“I must have if I shot him. Or she shot me,” Harp said.
“They didn’t shoot you,” one of the detectives responded.
Harp tried to back away and said the blood was from a fist fight.
But it was too late.
The detectives had it.
He was arrested on September 30, 2020 and charged with first-degree murder and armed criminal action.
At the end of the interview, Wineinger asked Harp, “Aren’t you feeling better? “After 27 years, knowing that you don’t have to worry for the rest of your life with this hanging over your head.”
He died a year later, at the age of 69, from an undisclosed illness.
Fox News Digital’s Jasmine Baehr contributed to this report.
Categories: Trending
Source: vtt.edu.vn