lane put debris from the fire into air-tight containers and sent them to the lab. but the larger questions facing investigators were who wanted edith ann haynes dead and why. she didn t have a real big social life. she would casually go out with friends maybe and have a drink or two after work. when it s a murder so off the wall and no real logic behind why it had to happen. why, you know. the most logical suspect was 31-year-old michael bryant, haynes co-worker at the kendall company. bryant bought ann s old home as an investment. she agreed to sell him this house where she had spent, you know, like 20 years, whatever, you know, her whole adult life. the deal was he would pay the mortgage which was left on it, which was not much. and he would pay her $25,000 in cash and help her out a little bit with her new place. when questioned by police,
earlier haynes had lived in a larger house about eight miles away. she was in a financial situation where she needed to sell her house. steve culverson, haynes nephew, and the administrator of her estate, looked through the rubble to find her financial records. i felt there had to be more evidence there. we took everything out of the cabinets and just searched for stuff. there was no evidence of where her keys were, her wallet. and he and the investigators found something suspicious. one of those was a signed contract between ann haynes and a man by the name of michael bryant. miss haynes sold her home to mr. bryant and already transferred the deed, but for some reason hadn t received the proceeds from the sale. that was a perry mason moment. he was going to pay her a sum of $25,000. she was selling her house off to pay her bills off and
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strip. a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer analyzed the samples and compared them to a database of over 750 known reference samples. it is like a doctor looking at an ekg. i have to be able to visually recognize what it is that i m looking at. the sample that was removed from the threshold was positive for gasoline. now investigators wanted to know who was the last person inside ann s home on the day of the fire. interestingly, neighbors saw michael bryant s truck at ann s home around 3 p.m., but the truck was gone by 5:00 p.m. the fire didn t start until two hours later. michael bryant and his wife were at the restaurant where he went, and the movie theater was in evans, which is a suburb of augusta, another good 15, 20 minutes to get there. so he was, you know, at least a
$25,000, the balance of the purchase price. so he had written a check to ann haynes for $25,000, asking her to hold the check, not cash it, until he could put the funds in the account. this kept getting delayed continually by him. and on the day of the fire, she indicated that she was going to cash that check, whether he wanted to or not. she may have realized that bryant had no intention of paying her since she had already signed the deed and didn t yet have the $25,000 he owed her. prosecutors believe bryant went to haynes mobile home on the day of the murder to ask her again to delay cashing his check for the $25,000. i just want you to leave. no one knows what took place. but the evidence shows bryant