Forensic Files Season 11, Episode 23 - Chief Suspect - Full Episode | Forensic Files

the wife of a respected police officer was murdered in her home but the motive was unclear
the crime went unsolved for more than a decade until a cold case unit took a fresh look and found evidence on the
nine one one call that had previously been overlooked i got a call felt man stay on the line
with me [Music] [Music] [Music] most everyone in the small town of springboro ohio knew jim and vicki
barton jim was a lieutenant in the local police department a rising star who many
believed would one day be chief of police he's always been very thorough very professional
easy to to work with and easy to get a hold of his wife vicki was a nurse supervisor at
the local hospital she loved her work she was a very compassionate person so i knew she was very good at what she did
one night after work jim returned home and found everything in disarray in the bedroom
he found his wife she had been shot to death my 911 has just been killed i think
where she is this is the senate there was a pill over her head and she's not breathing and she's got
her clothes off i don't know what's what's going on but give me some give me some help out here dispatch right now
[Music] just getting there was the first thing i wanted to do a lot of things were going through my
mind knowing jim was a policeman did someone did someone try to hurt him hurt his family
when paramedics arrived they pronounced vicky barton dead at the scene she had been shot three times in the
head execution style i found that odd two behind the ear that was different we never did really come to a full
understanding of was it overkill we just don't know in what order they occurred the motive didn't appear to be robbery
vicky's jewelry was still in the bedroom and jim's gun collection had been ransacked but nothing was missing
investigators found no foreign fingerprints in the house they dusted four feet high on those
walls all the way back and nothing they dusted the bedroom nothing at the autopsy the medical examiner
identified the murder weapon as a 22 caliber he also found evidence that vicky had
been sexually assaulted during the attack and bitten i had swapped this area and collected
saliva and that was in the next lab they were able to recover dna of the person who had bitter
this dna did not match anyone in the database of known criminal offenders as a precaution investigators also
compared the dna to vicki's husband jim and it also didn't match who would do something to her
she was the most likable person she could get along with anyone earlier on the day of the murder
vicki called her husband to say that a young man had come to the door needing help because his car had run out of gas
and jim didn't like that and he said what'd you do i hope you put a gun in his head she goes no and you know it was
okay jim he just won a gas he was a very polite young man and you know i got him some gas
he left was it possible that the man was actually casing the barton home and was the one who committed the murder
it could have been planned the whole thing i mean they could have targeted jim and vicki
or it could have been totally random i don't like to arrive at a decision too quick
but i didn't like what i was seeing i'll leave it at that the execution-style murderer vicki
barton a police lieutenant's wife rocked the small town of springboro ohio when we're talking about a woman being
murdered in her home in the middle of the day in warren county that was big news that was country
that's where people went to get away from bad things so it was big news police had to consider whether someone
jim barton once arrested had sought revenge there has never been a murder of anyone connected to a law enforcement
officer in this county that i can remember we've had officers killed but never a family member and never a
homicide investigators checked ex-convicts from jim's case files but didn't come up with
any leads days passed then weeks and no new information surfaced on the one-year anniversary of vicki's
murder the case remained unsolved the case was worked very heavily especially because it was a police
officer's wife that was murdered and they went through every lead that they had jim barton went on with his life
i offered to just lend an ear if he needed a friend to talk to that had known her
and he asked me for my phone number he wrote it down said i will probably call you
and he did the very next night fifteen months after vicky's murder he married marianne lacy vicky's childhood
friend and the bridesmaid at their wedding but the marriage was in trouble from the
start within months marianne started noticing strange behavior she said jim spent hours alone in the
darkened basement it was very quiet and i never knew what he was doing and that just that really put me into a
panic after 17 months the couple divorced meanwhile investigators never gave up the search for vicki's killer
this was something that haunted that community out there it was haunting a scary mystery and
and people known to the community and loved and respected it needed to be resolved then four years after the
murder police got their first real break gary henson a small-time criminal was arrested on a drug charge
during police questioning he said he knew something about vicki barton's murder he kind of started crying and broke down
to the detective and said i have something i need to tell you and he told him that his brother was involved in the
murder of the police officer's wife henson's half-brother william phelps told him about the crime
phelps said it was supposed to be a robbery but his accomplice probably high on drugs lost control sexually assaulted
vicki barton then killed her a background check revealed william phelps was not at work on the day vicky
was murdered unfortunately he was unavailable for questioning phelps killed himself just three months
after vicki barton's murder he acted strange that he actually went through a paranoid stage
sleeping with a gun and making sure the windows were locked every night and he put traps outside his window to make
alarm in case somebody would come up he acted like a guy that was very afraid after the homicide
and gary henson said that phelps never revealed the identity of his accomplice as a result of what gary henson told
them they then exhumed the body of his brother will phelps to try to determine if the dna that was found on vicki's
body was the same forensic pathologist dr lee lehmann relied on will phelps teeth for the dna
the reason we extract teeth for dna is because inside the teeth the cells are held in calcium
very firm hard materials in the enamel and it's not contaminated by bacteria and decomposition
william phelps dna did not match the saliva on vicki barton's body gary henson's dna didn't match either
we have evidence that he was in jail at the time of her murder and there was no way he could have been that person
it was another dead end i got up and took a long walk in fact i left the office i drove around for a
while thinking where do we go next another four years went by then a cold case unit reopened the
investigation of vicki barton's murder they were particularly interested in jim barton's comment to his colleague at the
murder scene he told me he said they killed her man those murdering bastards they killed her
but how did jim barton know there was more than one perpetrator you don't talk about them and they
unless you know who them and they are [Music] eight years after vicki barton's murder
the warren county sheriff's office in ohio formed a cold case unit specifically to reopen the investigation
they started at the very beginning by listening to the jim barton 911 after finding his wife's body
i'm checking the rest of the house [Music] all my stuff's laying out in here there
oh man i gotta call phelp man stay on the line with me we were beginning some realization here
that there's something to this or something more to this did he say he had to call for help
or that he had to call phelps i got a call man an informant identified william phelps
as one of the men involved in vicki barton's murder and it sounded like vicky's husband jim
mentioned phelps name on the 911 call oh man i got a call man jim barton still a lieutenant with the
springboro police insisted he said he needed to call for help he said he didn't know anyone named
phelps he was already on 9-1-1 so there's no reason or need to call for help and again
the word that i heard was phelps to find out what jim barton said on the 911 tape
investigators turned to dr robert fox a faculty member of ohio state university a linguist and expert on acoustic
phonics speech recognition is a science we put a lot of money into it but nothing is good
as the human ear and the human perceptual system in understanding speech in part because human listeners
are also human speakers and there's a very close connection between those two dr fox was asked if he could determine
if jim barton said phelps or for help and to eliminate any potential bias that was all he was told
[Music] 911 my wife has just been killed i think where she is dr fox took the 911 call and broke it
down into wave forms visual pictures that detailed the energy of voice and cadence
he was particularly interested in two groups of sounds vowels which are soft and fricatives or hard sounds
fricatives include sounds like f as in frank and the reason it's interesting is that in this particular
call one of the critical issues with whether he said f as in phelp or fine or farm or
whether there was an h in there that might have indicated that he said help give me some
dr fox used a computer program to perform a spectrum analysis of the sounds associated with individual
letters in the recording after i had isolated a number of different f's for example in mr barton's
voice i then compared these different f's in a systematic way one to another i also excised several examples of mr
barton saying h and i compared those to the fricatives give me some help give me some help
when the key part of the tape only two and a half seconds was analyzed the result was clear i got a call man
barton was saying a simple f sound as in phelps he was not saying something more complex
such as for help i must admit that this 911 tape was the clearest tape i'd ever heard of that
fashion very easy to understand very easy to analyze and the audio analysis also showed
something unexpected jim barton was moving things around the house while he was talking on the telephone
lieutenant [Music] you shouldn't be doing this he was an evidence technician he's a trained
evidence technician he knows he shouldn't be touching or moving anything in that house
did you have anything to do with your home being burglarized that day no i did that did you have anything to do with
your wife's murder that day nothing jim barton still maintained his innocence and volunteered to take a
polygraph test jim barton failed the test when news of barton's possible involvement became public
a local waitress came forward to say she saw jim barton and william phelps sitting together in her restaurant
she saw jim barton talking to well felt she saw them together jim barton denied knowing will phelps but she testified
that she had seen them together in the past ten years after the murder jim barton was arrested and charged with
complicity to commit involuntary manslaughter the police informant gary henson now
revealed one last piece of information he had previously withheld he told our investigators that jim
barton had contacted his brother and said i needed my wife scared and could you do a burglary to scare her
but why would jim barton want to scare his wife when that question was finally answered no one
not even jim's best friends could believe it [Music] investigators wondered why jim barton a
15-year veteran of the springboro police department would hire others to intimidate and frighten his wife vicky
then they remembered that jim barton had actively campaigned for the job of police chief
but to get that position he had to live within the city limits of springboro and apparently vicky didn't
want to move from their 10-acre farm located outside of town that's why we think he did this he wanted to scare his
wife off of the farm they were in a remote desolate area into the city where he would then be able to apply for chief
jim wanted to scare vicki he hired these people to come in and scare from some of the testimony i heard or
listening to the cold case he actually paid these people an extra dollar amount to fire one shot above
vicki's head investigators believe that it was william phelps who knocked on vicki's door telling her he ran out
of gas and that he did so to make sure she was alone [Music] phelps later returned to the house with
an accomplice intending to rob her [Music] instead his accomplice possibly high on
drugs lost control and sexually assaulted vicky then he killed her because she could have identified them
[Music] prosecutors believe jim barton came home expecting his wife to tell him about the robbery
instead he found she had been murdered he called 911 but according to audio experts mumbled
something incriminating almost as if he was talking to himself i'm checking the brush the rest of the
house all my stuff's laying out in here there oh man william phelps killed himself three
months after vicky's murder most likely because of his involvement in this case he did not leave a note and
his wife wondered for years what happened and why he committed suicide ironically jim barton moved into
springboro shortly after vicky's murder but he never achieved his dream of becoming police chief
he was passed over for the promotion three different times before the trial jim barton was offered a plea bargain in
return for identifying phelps accomplice but he refused he always insisted he knew nothing about the crime
it's hard to say what jim barton knows and doesn't know we plan at some point to go to him and once this is all
resolved the appeals are over and ask him if he can help us out with who that other person is
but it has not happened yet jim barton was convicted of complicity to commit manslaughter
he was sentenced to a minimum of 15 years in prison had it not been for the forensic analysis of jim's 9-1-1 call
the case might never have been solved jim barton is where he needs to be doesn't necessarily settle well since
it's a cop but again it's the truth a crime was committed and justice has been served
these are pros and when you're a pro it's real simple no one gets away with murder
i don't care what uniform you're wearing no one gets away with murder [Music] [Music]
[Music] you

The wife of a respected police officer was murdered in her own home. The crime went unsolved for more than a decade, and then a newly formed Cold Case Unit took a fresh look at the evidence.

Forensic Files is the longest-running true crime series in television history. Evidence and interviews with experts help solve real crimes, disease outbreaks and accidents around the world.

Brief Summary

Vicki Barton's murder led to her husband Jim's arrest for complicity after a cold case unit reopened the investigation years later.

Key points

Vicki Barton's Murder. The wife of a police officer is found murdered, shocking the small town of Springboro.
Cold Case Unit Reopens Investigation. Years later, a cold case unit reexamines the unsolved murder, uncovering new evidence.
Jim Barton's 911 Call. Jim Barton's 911 call raises suspicions about his involvement in his wife's murder.
Jim Barton's Arrest. After years of investigation, Jim Barton is arrested for complicity in his wife's murder.
Forensic Analysis Solves Case. Forensic analysis of Jim Barton's 911 call leads to his conviction for manslaughter.

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