going to believe this. i just dealt with that guy a few months ago. john s friend owned a machine and fabrication shop. he said james lapan had come in looking for a tool, one he could use to fix a silencer. he s repairing a silencer. correct. just a couple of months before your brother s murdered with perhaps a silencer. correct. so i contact the detectives, gave them the information. detective garcia obtained a search warrant for james lapan s home. in his garage, her team found 18 boxes of. 45 caliber ammo, all with the distinctive five-star stamp. they also found two spent shell casings that matched the ones found at nick s house. so the same gun fired the bullets at the crime scene and a couple of casings that you found in lapan s garage? yes. inside the house, investigators didn t find the gun itself, but they did find this empty box for a
she broke it off pretty quickly because she did not want to be the other person, and he didn t want to leave his family. now detective garcia had someone knew she wanted to talk with, james lapan s wife, serena. i know he s been, um fell off the marital bandwagon so to speak. serena said james had told her about the affair weeks earlier. they were going through counseling, she said, and working on the marriage. and when detective garcia asked her about the night of nick s murder her statement was exactly the same as james . they hung out together during the day. they went to bed together. they woke up together. yes. so she alibis him. yes. you wouldn t try to be covering up for him for anything? no. okay. if serena was telling the truth, james could not be the killer. as detective garcia pondered that, nick s brothers john kept up his own investigation. he mentioned lapan s name to a childhood friend. remember how tucson can be a big small town? he said,
one neighbor said she heard a noise around 4:00 a. m. but wasn t sure what it was. investigators thought that could well be nick s time of death. while detective garcia worked the scene, two other detectives went to john morelos office to tell him what had happened. then john had to break the news to his mother. a tough conversation to have. oh, most definitely. that was probably one of the toughest things i ve ever done in my life. kristy also wrestled with her new reality, a life without nick. i went from this amazing life to just, you know, being traumatized and just complete disbelief. while nick s family faced the loss of a man they loved, investigators began to learn what nick s co-workers and exes already knew. he was not beloved by everyone, not by a long shot.
oh, maybe he got stuck on a call with his boss, or maybe he slept in a little bit, you know. a few hours later, still no word from nick. so kristy drove to nick s house and went up the stairs to the master bedroom. the door was barely open. i zeroed in on him. he was just laying there, and he was just just full of bullet holes. he s just laying there, and he looks like he has a bullet hole in his head. this is the man i m supposed to marry. this was just not not possible. and the police arrived, and the nightmare began. we received a message advising that there was a homicide on the north side and that the whole unit needed to respond. pima county sheriff s detective jennifer garcia had been in the homicide unit for
nick s bedroom, in his closet, and on a mouthwash cap in his bathroom. the floor was very sticky, and it smelled very heavily of mouthwash. so we felt at the time that whoever did this tried to clean up whatever tracks they left. in the bedroom, more evidence the killer tried to clean up. it appeared that the rug under the bed was cut. like half of the rug was gone. detective garcia believed the killer bled so heavily on the rug that he or she cut the rug and took it right out of nick s house. there was also evidence the killer failed to get rid of. garcia s team recovered 11 shell casings, each with a unique five-star stamp. and this was odd. 11 shots, yet none of the neighbors called 911. very early on, the detectives that i was working with, who have done previous homicides, they believe that a silencer was used.