Detectives in Richmond, Texas reclassified a woman’s death from a suicide to a murder this week after her boyfriend, moved by watching “The Passion of the Christ” confessed to hanging her in her apartment in January, the Houston Chronicle reports.
He avoided detection by using tricks he learned watching the television show “CSI,” he told police.
Dan Leach II, 21, told Fort Bend County detectives that he had strangled his girlfriend and made her death appear to be a suicide after she told him she was pregnant with his child, investigators said.
Leach, who was indicted on a murder charge Monday and arrested Tuesday, is in the county jail in lieu of $100,000 bail.
Until he went to detectives earlier this month, Detective Mike Kubricht said, investigators believed Ashley Nicole Wilson, 19, had hanged herself.
Wilson’s parents, Renee Wilson Coulter and Dan Wilson, said they never believed she killed herself.
Coulter found her daughter’s body Jan. 19 in the woman’s Richmond-area apartment. She said she had been concerned because her daughter, a Wharton County Junior College student, had not used her bank account in several days.
All evidence pointed to suicide, Kubricht said.
Link: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/topstory/2468569