GIST: One day in 2001, Jeffrey Armstrong was at his mother’s house on the east side of Winona when he heard his dog barking in the backyard. He walked out and saw that the dog had dug up something from under the house. It was a gun — a .380 automatic, rusting and dirty on one side. Armstrong immediately thought of the Tardy Furniture murders five years earlier, a crime for which Curtis Flowers had been convicted and sentenced to death. Armstrong knew that the gun used to shoot the four Tardy employees on July 16, 1996, was a .380, and that the murder weapon had never been found. He gave the gun to investigators. Then, he says, it disappeared. Prosecutors have said that Flowers was the only serious suspect from the beginning of the case. But a yearlong investigation by APM Reports has found compelling evidence that points away from Flowers. APM Reports recently interviewed a man named Willie James Hemphill, who said he was a suspect early in the investigation. And the gun that Armstrong says he discovered is additionally important because of where it was found — in the opposite direction from where the prosecution claims Flowers fled from Tardy Furniture. If the gun is the murder weapon, it indicates that perhaps someone else committed the crime. The revelations are among a number of discoveries by APM Reports journalists investigating the 22-year-old case. Previous stories have reported that there’s no direct evidence against Flowers, including no reliable evidence placing him near the scene or linking him to the murder weapon. Moreover, all three jailhouse informants who testified against Flowers have recanted, one directly to a reporter. "A gun found on an alternate escape route:  The question of what happened to the .380 lingers. Armstrong says he turned the gun over to the Winona Police Department. Police Chief Tommy Bibbs and Dan Herod, the department’s chief investigator, told APM Reports that Armstrong had turned in a gun. They said the pistol was sent to the district attorney’s office for testing by the Mississippi crime lab. The state crime lab told APM Reports that it has no record of receiving the gun. It’s not clear if the gun was tested or whether it’s the murder weapon.  “They'll never know the whole truth,” said Armstrong, who’s long believed that Flowers is innocent. “This thing has been a mess since the day it happened.” District Attorney Doug Evans has refused to answer specific questions from APM Reports about evidence in the Flowers case.  In 2016, Flowers’ defense team asked a state judge to order prosecutors to produce the gun for testing. At the hearing, Evans and a lawyer with the Mississippi Attorney General’s office assisting on the case denied that prosecutors had the gun. The judge ruled against the defense. The gun’s present whereabouts are unknown. If the gun was the murder weapon, it could have undermined the case against Flowers. The gun, said Armstrong, was found just 700 feet east of Tardy Furniture. That’s the opposite direction that prosecutors say Flowers fled. One key prosecution witness said she saw Flowers running west from the store not long after the murders, though other witnesses later questioned the veracity of her claims. East of Tardy Furniture — a direction an assailant could have traversed within minutes of committing the crime — there’s a direct path from the store to where the gun was found. Moreover, the path includes a drainage tunnel under railroad tracks leading to a drainage ditch, all of which could have allowed the shooter to escape largely unseen. Men with criminal histories lived just a few blocks from where the gun was found. That includes Hemphill, who lived in the neighborhood on and off during the 1990s. Hemphill questioned for hours, jailed:   As the Clarion Ledger previously reported, the APM Reports investigation found evidence that investigators considered Hemphill a suspect in the days after the Tardy Furniture murders. The investigative file compiled in Flowers' case contained only one mention of Hemphill —- the document he signed waiving his Miranda rights before questioning. Flowers' attorneys asked investigators about Hemphill briefly during the sixth trial in June 2010. Investigators said they quickly eliminated him as a suspect. “I think they talked to him for five minutes, I don’t think they learned anything,” John Johnson, an investigator for the DA’s office, testified. It wasn’t clear exactly why investigators ruled Hemphill out. It took APM Reports months to track down Hemphill, but when reporters found him — at a courthouse in Indianapolis — he said he was questioned for two or three hours about the murders and that his statements were tape recorded. No documents or transcripts about Hemphill’s questioning were turned over to the defense. Legal experts say that prosecutors are usually required to turn over to the defense information about alternative suspects. Told by reporters that investigators said they only questioned him for five minutes, Hemphill said: “It was definitely more than five minutes that they talked to me. It took five minutes to read me my Miranda rights and have me sign papers and set up the recording, the tape recorder. That takes five minutes.” He said investigators were very interested in his shoes. He wore Grant Hill Fila sneakers in size 9 or 10 — the same kind of shoe that left the bloody shoe print at the murder scene. Hemphill told APM Reports that he was shopping at a mall in Memphis at the time of the murders. His alibi witness didn’t return calls. County records uncovered by APM Reports show that Hemphill was booked into jail after his questioning in 1996 and that he remained in jail for 11 days. After Hemphill’s release, the investigation remained focused on Flowers. Regardless of why investigators ruled out Hemphill, if he was a serious suspect and if the prosecution didn’t turn over that information to Flowers’ defense, it might endanger the conviction, legal experts say. In a motion filed in the weeks since the release of the “In the Dark” podcast, Flowers’ defense team cited the Hemphill revelations as a reason the court should move forward with the latest appeal. The lawyers termed it “stunning new evidence that has come to light.” While his appeals continue, Flowers remains on death row. He will soon have spent more than half his life in prison."

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