The Bugs Bunny Alibi

0:08I've handled hundreds of firearms through the course of daily case work.

0:19The majority are handgun types. And then we see a fair amount of semi-automatic rifles and a variety of shotguns.

0:34Detectives Lahren and McCarthy presented this case to the firearms unit. They had a woman who had accidentally shot her husband with a revolver. Tell me what this gun is. This is the same make and model firearm that was recovered from the Duffy residence. When I first walked in, the sun was coming through the sliding glass door. It just looked very peaceful until I walked in and saw Mr. Duffy laying on the couch. There was a lot of blood on the carpet, and there was some blood on the wall. Lots of blood. But based on what I was being told about her, middle class, educated woman, she didn't fit the profile of a murderer.

1:21This could be an accident. She's eccentric and quirky. She gives that impression the minute you meet her. She was very entertaining and very funny, loved to laugh. You either really, really liked Linda, or you really thought, wow, she cannot be trusted. I've investigated well over 100 murders. I'm sorry, Linda? Okay. I was very anxious to hear how this accident happened. You have to understand, Pat and I joke around a lot with each other. She said, we have this thing that we always do. We morph into cartoon characters. I'm sorry, they what? They morph into cartoon characters. What's up, Doc? There was a Bugs Bunny cartoon with Elmer Fudd, and he does this silly little Elmer Fudd voice, no more bullets.

2:05No more bullets. And she said she began to talk to him in her Elmer Fudd voice. No more bullets. And she said she wanted to impress him, and she walked over and picked the gun up. No more bullets? No more bullets? He told me there was no bullets in the gun. Well, I don't believe she could have fired it in the manner she said she did. It's just answers right there. I wanted to believe her story. It's not a believable story. I had that gut feeling there was something more sinister.

2:47This is the matter of Linda Gwatz. She is present before the court. Both counsel are present. Seven years after she shot her husband in their suburban living room, Linda Duffy-Guatz is in a Los Angeles County court denying as strongly as she can that she is a murderess. This was a horrible accident. And I wish and pray constantly that I could be able to take away your pain, but I can't. This case is not a whodunit. It's more of a why'd she do it. Linda admits she shot her husband Patrick Duffy in 2007, but she says it was an awful and unlikely accident. She's had to convince authorities that fact can be stranger than fiction, because her legal defense has featured, among other things, a cast of cartoon characters.

3:43Here, let me see that thing. Her lawyer has used the words of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd to explain her actions, as he insisted she is innocent. We're going to ask you to tell us what happened today. Linda talked to police, voluntarily and without a lawyer, just hours after the shooting. It was pointed down. And the next thing I know, his hand was right there, just laying there.

4:18Well, let's go by the house. Sean McCarthy and Shannon Lahren have been homicide detectives for the L.A. County Sheriff's Department for 13 years. Forgive the cliche, but they really did think they'd pretty much seen it all. Here's the house right here. And then, on April 26, 2007, they got a call about a shooting at the Duffy's house in suburban Whittier.

4:50Okay, stay on the line with me, ma 'am. This is the couch that you saw in the living room? Yes. Yes. Mr. Duffy was right here. McCarthy and Laren found Patrick Duffy dead on the couch. His left hand was in his pocket. And his right knee was being supported by a pillow. Very comfortable, relaxed. There was blood pooled on the floor and splattered on the wall. And it was a pretty good-sized blood puddle right in here. Clearly he had a gunshot wound to the head. The couple's two teenage sons, Sean and Thomas, were at school. So Linda was the only surviving witness, and Detective Lahren had a funny feeling.

5:30It looked like he'd been sleeping on the couch, and somebody walked up and shot him in his sleep. What did you think? I was leaning that this was an accident. Detective McCarthy has been investigating homicide cases for about 13 years and knows how to spot even the tiniest clues. He saw very little here that made him suspicious. Do you guys disagree frequently on cases? I disagree with all of my partners on every case. Well, so how does that work? I think we kind of wait until we have more information. I wanted to hear her story. She was very entertaining. I love to tell stories. Julie Prendergast has been listening to Linda's stories since they first became friends in a college music program in the 80s.

6:16She said, well, actually, I'm from Ireland. And she started talking with what I thought was a pretty phony accent. That was my first indication that Linda was a little bit different. Julie says Linda could be irreverent, even goofy. I would say, Linda, I'm going to tell you something, and you're going to want to laugh, but we're in class right now, so don't laugh out loud. And it would just pop out anyway. After they left school, Julie and Linda ended up working at the same place. and one day, Julie says, Linda called with some news. She said, I'm so excited, I'm getting married and I'd like you to be in my wedding.

6:53The groom was a man Linda had met four years earlier, Patrick Duffy, a radio engineer, gun enthusiast and private pilot. She just said it was like her dream come true and she couldn't be happier. They seemed happy as a family. They understood each other. Patrick's sister, Catherine Hunt, says Patrick and Linda There were soulmates and playmates. They were kidding with each other, joking with each other. We're just always just joking around with each other and being silly and having a good time. And it was that silliness that became a cornerstone of Linda's story when she explained to police what happened the day she killed her husband.

7:34Then I came into the family room and he was sitting on the sofa. She said they had just come back from a doctor's appointment. Patrick had chronic circulation problems. Linda said he'd been planning to go to the shooting range. His.38, one of three revolvers he kept in the house, was nearby. We keep it in this little locked box. Linda told police she usually stayed away from the guns, but that day she picked up the.38. And the story got stranger as it went on. We do this little silly thing. We always kind of relate little silly conversations to like cartoons that we've seen when we were younger and stuff.

8:15And he does this silly little Elmer Fudd voice, no more bullets. And she claimed she said to him, no more bullets in Elmer Fudd's voice. No more bullets. And she said his response was, no more bullets. No more bullets. She said it was a game they played all the time. and that when her husband said, no more bullets, in his Elmer Fudd voice, she took it to mean the gun was empty and that it was safe to try something Patrick had taught her. She said that she then wanted to impress him by showing him she can shoot a cowboy style. It's called fan firing, and any fan of Westerns knows it. You hold the trigger down and keep pulling back the hammer so the gun fires quickly.

9:07She says once she started fan firing, she couldn't stop in time to avoid hitting her husband, who leaned into the line of fire. And the next thing I know, his hand was right there. The statement about the fan firing, it just didn't sound right. But his partner, Detective Sean McCarthy, who had heard his share of crazy explanations from suspected killers, listened to that Panic! 911 tape, listened to Linda's story, and concluded the story was just wacky enough to be true. The overwhelming feeling that I got from her was she was odd at best and eccentric at worst. After they interviewed Linda for an hour, they let her go home.

9:59And when you left work that day, did you have in your mind that she was a suspect? No. His gut told him Linda was innocent, but he'd need more. He'd need science. The muzzle of the firearm was between a distance of one and seven inches from his head.

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11:17When he first studied the scene where Linda Duffy killed her husband, Detective Sean McCarthy was pretty sure it was an accident. He believed her story, that she had reenacted their favorite Bugs Bunny cartoon. No more bullets. No more bullets? And then fan-fired the gun. And when he talked to Linda later that day... Start with when you got up this morning. She said nothing that made him doubt her. It is my fault. No, it's not your fault. It's just that we need to understand. Laren and McCarthy were beginning to understand more about what happened inside the Duffy home, especially after they talked to the medical examiner, who had just done an autopsy on Patrick Duffy.

12:08There was a second gunshot wound. Linda Duffy claimed this was an accident, but she had shot her husband in the head not once, but twice. And believe it or not, even seasoned investigators can miss that kind of clue at the crime scene. You could not see the second gunshot wound? Well, because of dried blood and the amount of blood and coagulated blood, we weren't privy to the second gunshot wound. What did you make of that? Well, it certainly was a red flag. But it was not just a red flag for McCarthy's partner, Shannon Lahren. It was more like a bright red arrow pointing right at Linda Duffy.

12:55There were so many highly improbable events that would have had to have all lined up for this to actually have been an accident. They didn't line up. Still, Sean McCarthy was not convinced. Why didn't you just say, this is going to be murder? Because I needed to be convinced myself that this was murder. The last thing in the world I want to do is send an innocent person to prison for the rest of their lives. It wasn't enough for McCarthy to know what happened. He wanted to know why it happened. We struggled to find a compelling motive. And we looked, and we looked, and we looked. But they couldn't really find one.

13:33The Duffies seem to be an average middle-class family living here in the L.A. suburbs. There was a life insurance policy on Patrick, but they'd bought that decades earlier. Plus, there was no evidence of cheating. And considering her eccentric personality, Detective McCarthy could not just dismiss Linda's story. Okay, maybe this could have happened the way she said it, because she's so quirky and eccentric. But it was about to get a little harder for McCarthy to believe Linda's story

14:08because of Tracy Peck, the firearms expert for the sheriff's department who was brought into the case by McCarthy and Lahren. Remember, according to Linda, she fired the way they did in the movies. It is possible to do that pretty easily with the right kind of gun. This is the kind of gun that you can fan fire, right? Correct. So this is a single action revolver. This type of firearm is fired by cocking the hammer and pulling the trigger. The guns they used in the cowboy movies were single action guns. You can easily keep firing quickly by pulling and releasing the hammer while the trigger is held back.

14:57When the hammer is fanned, the cylinder will rotate with this type of gun. So it will fire the cartridges in the chambers of the cylinder as it's being fanned. The Duffies had two single-action revolvers in the house, but the gun Linda used to shoot her husband was not one of them. It is a double-action revolver, and there's a big difference. The shooter simply pulls the trigger, which accomplishes both cocking the hammer and releasing the hammer, and the gun will fire. To rapid-fire a double-action revolver, the shooter has to do all sorts of things at the right time and in the right sequence.

15:40Is this gun designed to be fired that way? No. For the purposes of this case, I essentially invented a way in which I would conceivably fan this. And that included pulling the trigger, releasing the trigger, fanning the hammer, pulling the trigger, releasing the trigger, and fanning the hammer, but doing it pretty quickly. And Peck says it's very hard to aim while doing all that. She says the unexpected, deafening noise of the gun and the recoil would have alarmed Linda if she didn't know the gun was loaded. According to Peck, it would have been next to impossible for Linda, who claims to be an amateur, to shoot her husband twice rapidly by accident, especially since the wounds were so close together.

16:34I don't find it a very believable story. I still wanted to believe her, but it clearly couldn't have gone down the way that she said that it went down. By now, Detective McCarthy was all but certain that Patrick Duffy's death was no accident. But the two detectives felt they didn't have enough to prove it. Because of a heavy workload, it took two years. But in January 2009, McCarthy and Laren brought Linda back in for another chat. The video wasn't working, but you can still hear their conversation. He showed me how to do it really fast because you've got to do it like the cowboy. Well, in the second interview, I think we were both convinced that this was a murder.

17:22They showed her a video of Tracy Peck fan-firing the gun. I think she was certainly surprised when we explained to her how difficult it would be. I could tell the light bulb went on in her brain and she said, I got to at least change the story a little bit. Linda now said she and her husband had practiced fan firing with an unloaded revolver for years. Like 15, 20 times. Did you believe her this time? No. But the detectives wanted to give Linda one last chance to show them how she fired the gun. And they made her an unusual offer. Meet us at the range. We'll bring an exact replica and show us that you can fire this gun in the manner that you said.

18:12The detectives were certain Linda would not kill again. So they let her go home again and waited to hear from her about their offer. days turned into weeks and then months and life went on at the homicide bureau we change partners and when that happens you start getting new cases and other cases start falling to the wayside as the years passed linda might have thought she was off the hook but her past was about to catch up with her. The district attorney said, I'm going to file this case and I need to go get her.

19:09With no news for nearly five years, Patrick Duffy's brother, John, and sister, Catherine Hunt, thought the police had decided his death was an accident and had closed the investigation. But Catherine says she had a hard time believing what Linda told her when she called on that awful day. She was incoherent. And I said, what happened? He was cleaning his gun and it accidentally went off. Linda had told the police that she had shot Patrick by accident. But later that night, she told his siblings he'd shot himself. Could you picture him having that kind of an accident? No, absolutely not. We were raised with guns.

19:55And we were taught to empty our weapons before even entering the house. And that was like the number one rule. It was hard to believe that he had done something like that. And Catherine learned she was right. the day after Pat died when she met Linda at the funeral home. I said, where was he shot? And she went like this, just like that. That's when it hit me that he didn't shoot himself. I said, so tell me what really happened. She said, oh, you're going to hate me, you're going to hate me, you're going to hate me. I said, no, I'm not going to hate you, but I need to know what the truth is. And I said, did you shoot my brother in the head?

20:38And she said, yes. It was there, in the funeral home, where Catherine first heard the tale of Elmer Fudd. Pat had told her, no bullets. No, no. No bullets, like Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd, because they were talking cartoon characters sometimes. She thought the gun wasn't loaded and it went off. I couldn't quite understand why she had lied. If it was an accident, it was an accident. But she had lied to us. But the police still had to prove she had lied to them about why she shot him. Detectives had interrogated her twice and released her twice. The second time they let her go, they'd made that unusual offer to meet her at the firing range.

21:28We even told her, it can be at your convenience. They weren't shocked when they didn't hear back from her. And several months later, they stopped by the Duffy's house and saw a for sale sign. Her sons were home. They said she's on her honeymoon in Italy. Two years after the shooting, Linda Duffy was Linda Gwatz, newly married to Lawrence Gwatz, who anyone in the saxophone world knows is a world-class player. When we Googled him, he was playing in Carnegie Hall. And once again, when wedding bells rang, so did Julie Prendergast's phone. She asked me what I sing in that wedding. And I said, what?

22:16Linda, I'm not coming to your wedding. Something's not right surrounding the death of Patrick. Julie says she was uneasy with how Linda just moved on. She dyed her hair blonde. She was wearing different style of clothes. She seemed to be walking on air on clouds, like, oh, just as happy as can be. A year after shooting her first husband, Linda met Guatz online. She moved to Mississippi, where her new husband was a music professor. She was out of sight, but for Detectives Lahren and McCarthy, she was not out of mind. Did you forget about this case? Was there a period of time where... Oh, no, absolutely not.

22:58When their workload with their new partners permitted, McCarthy and Lahren each turned their attention back to Linda.

23:08They wanted to take a new look at the blood evidence with a new expert, Paul Delhauer. He studied the photos and police reports and concluded Linda had to be lying. Based on her statements, police believed Linda was claiming that she had fired quickly and from the same spot. She moved and the relative position of the gun to the head changed. We are standing next to the couch on which Patrick Duffy died. Delhauer said the blood evidence told him a lot, especially these tiny stains on Linda's clothing and the walls called spatter, which he says came from the first shot. The barrel has to be within about three inches of the head in order to produce the spatter.

23:54Delhauer says the second shot created a large pool of blood on the floor in the exact spot where Linda said she was standing. She would have been getting jets of blood hitting her. Linda Duffy have any blood on her? Very little. Very, very little. Police thought they now had proof that Linda was lying. she didn't have enough blood on her after the shooting to support her story. Lahren and McCarthy thought they knew what really happened. She took aim, fired one round while he was sleeping, realized he wasn't dead, comes back on target, fires the second round, and that's why they're within two inches of each other.

24:38They believe Patrick's death wasn't an accident. It was an execution. By 2012, the new prosecutor assigned to the case was eager to move ahead, and police began talking to Linda's co-workers. Boy, that was very revealing. They consistently talked about how she was so charming, but then as time went on, they started finding out that she was this compulsive liar. And Julie Prendergast had a few stories to tell about her one-time friend's record when it comes to telling the truth. We all have one gallbladder. Linda had hers removed three times. Linda just always needed, seemed to want to have attention.

25:25It was enough for McCarthy. I became absolutely convinced that we need the prosecutor. her. So finally, in May 2012, five years after Patrick Duffy's death, Detective McCarthy flew to Mississippi where Linda and her new husband were living in a comfortable home and she had gotten a job at the university. You knock on the door, what's her reaction? Her reaction was, I thought the investigation was all over. The investigation wasn't over. McCarthy arrested Linda Duffy-Gwatz for murder. And everyone was in for some surprises.

26:24It's been six years since Linda Duffy shot her husband to death, and she thought she was going on with her life, with a new husband, a new house, a new look and a new town. But now she's going on trial for murder. Tuesday, her freedom came to an end. And Joseph Lowe is her attorney. Unfortunately, on this particular day, she was going to play with a gun again like she's done so many times before, and she rapid-fired it in the top of his head. It's a complete accident. He'll argue that based partly on the words of Elmer Fudd... No more bullets. Linda thought the.38 revolver was empty. Did you ever consider the possibility that this, what we'll call a Bugs Bunny defense, for lack of a better term, could be true?

27:12Zero percent chance it's true. Deputy District Attorney Robert Villa says in 27 years on the job, he's never seen a defense rely, even partly, on a cartoon. Bugs is having a conversation with Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd. Watching a prosecutor parrot a bunny was a first for us, too. But an official transcript of the cartoon had to be made. What do you know? No more bullets. And then Bugs Bunny says, no more bullets? As they're having this conversation, just as she went to fan fire the gun, he laid down and put his own head right in front of the gun. So ridiculous. You know and I know that strange things do happen.

28:00Strange things happen. This wasn't one of them. He was asleep. She shot him in the head twice. It was that simple, open and shut? For me, it was. But it wasn't so simple for the jury. Over two weeks, they heard three recordings of Linda telling authorities about cartoon rabbits and cowboy fan firing. They also heard days of testimony from dueling experts about whether Linda's explanation made any sense at all. It was a lot for the jury to consider. It was difficult, you know. For every expert, there's another one who can tell you a different story. The defense questioned whether prosecution expert witness Paul Delhauer...