"It has to be 100 percent or I will not offer that opinion," he testified. At Flowers' last trial, in June 2010, Balash was unequivocal that the bullets found at the crime scene matched Doyle's gun. This was a key piece of evidence linking Flowers to the crime. Balash, a retired Michigan state trooper who's a ballistics and explosives expert with decades of experience in the field, testified at the five subsequent trials that the gun Flowers allegedly stole was the murder weapon. He first examined the evidence in 1998, after Flowers had been found guilty the first time. But prosecutors wanted another expert opinion. The Mississippi Crime Lab in Jackson had matched the bullets. Investigators dug those bullets out of a wooden post on the property of Simpson's mother and compared them to a bullet that they recovered from a mattress at the crime scene. It's the gun prosecutors say Flowers stole the morning of the murders. Ultimately, they uncovered two bullets they believed had been fired by the gun belonging to Doyle Simpson, who was Curtis Flowers' step-uncle.
How could they link a suspect with a gun they didn't have?
380-caliber handgun had been used to kill the four employees at Tardy Furniture in 1996, but the gun had never been found. As a court-appointed forensics expert, Balash had been tasked with reviewing the ballistics evidence in the Curtis Flowers case.įrom the start, investigators had faced a fundamental problem: They didn't have the murder weapon. In June 2010, David Balash took the stand in the courthouse in Winona, Mississippi.