Three Shots in the Dark

There are three shots fired in the dark of a garage in southern Indiana, and when the first officers arrive, they find a man standing in the driveway, and he is crying, and he is saying he just got home, he just found them, he doesn't understand what has happened. What has happened, the evidence would eventually tell a jury thirteen years later, is that Kim Camm and her two small children — Bradley and Jill — are dead inside that garage, and the man standing in the driveway crying is, prosecutors would argue, the man who killed them.

But that is the end of the story. Or rather, it is where the story arrives after a long and winding road through three trials, two overturned convictions, a second suspect, a mountain of forensic debate, and a community in Floyd County, Indiana that could not quite escape the gravitational pull of what happened on the night of September 28, 2000.

Let's begin, as we must, with who was lost.

Kimberly Camm was thirty-five years old, and by every account gathered from the people who loved her, she was the kind of person who made a room feel warmer simply by walking into it. She had grown up in the region, had deep roots in southern Indiana, and had built what looked from the outside like a solid, comfortable life. She worked as a branch manager for a local company, she was organized and dependable, and she was, above all else, devoted to her children in the particular, fierce way that parents are when they have found their purpose. Bradley was seven years old and played basketball — he had his father's athletic build, people said, and his mother's easy smile. Jill was five, still in that bright and wondering stage of childhood where everything is new and the world is a place of endless possibility. They were, by all documentation and testimony from those who knew them, a family at the center of a community, surrounded by extended relatives, embedded in their church, rooted to southern Indiana in the way that families are when they have never had a reason to leave.

David Camm was thirty-five as well. He had been an Indiana State Police trooper for eleven years before leaving the force in 2000 to work for his uncle's construction business. He was known in the community, recognized, respected in the way that men in uniform tend to be in small towns. He coached youth basketball. He attended his children's events. He presented, to the world outside his home, the face of a dedicated family man.

What was happening inside that home, prosecutors would spend years arguing, was something considerably more complicated.

On the evening of September 28, 2000, David Camm said he left work and went to play basketball at a church gymnasium with a group of friends and neighbors — a regular game, a routine night, the kind of unremarkable midweek activity that builds the texture of an ordinary life. He said he arrived home around nine-thirty in the evening, pulled into the attached garage, and found his wife and children shot to death. Kim was in the garage near the family's utility vehicle. Bradley and Jill were inside it. Camm called 911, and the call was recorded, and in the recordings he is audible — frantic, desperate, or performing desperation, depending entirely on who you believed.

State Police arrived, and within hours, the investigation had turned toward the man who made the call.

The reasons for that turn were numerous, and they would be litigated exhaustively over the next thirteen years. First, investigators quickly learned what the people closest to David Camm already knew: that he had been, by the accounts of multiple women who would come forward, engaged in a pattern of extramarital affairs throughout his marriage. Several women cooperated with investigators, and prosecutors would argue that Kim Camm had discovered the extent of her husband's infidelities and that the marriage had reached a breaking point. Second, and far more consequentially in the courtroom, forensic analysts examining Camm's T-shirt identified what they described as high-velocity blood spatter — the kind of fine mist of blood that, expert witnesses would testify, is produced at the moment of a gunshot, not during subsequent contact with victims. Eight tiny spots of blood on his shirt, the State's experts argued, placed David Camm at the moment of the shootings, not arriving afterward.

David Camm had an alibi. He had been playing basketball at the church. Multiple witnesses confirmed he was there. The question — the question that would consume three trials — was what time he left, and whether he had sufficient time to drive home, commit three murders, and call 911 while presenting himself as a shocked and grieving husband and father.

He was arrested in March of 2002, roughly eighteen months after the murders. The first trial, held in 2002, resulted in a conviction on three counts of murder. The jury heard the blood spatter evidence, heard about the affairs, heard the alibi witnesses, and returned a guilty verdict. David Camm was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Then the story bent in a direction no one had fully anticipated.

In 2004, while Camm was incarcerated awaiting the resolution of his appeal, investigators developed evidence pointing to a second individual: a man named Charles Boney, a convicted felon with a documented history of violence against women, specifically a disturbing pattern involving women's shoes and feet. A DNA profile developed from evidence at the crime scene — specifically from a gray sweatshirt left at the scene — matched Boney. When confronted, Boney initially claimed Camm had hired him to commit the murders. Then he changed his account. Then he changed it again. Charles Boney was charged with three counts of murder as well.

The Indiana Court of Appeals had already granted Camm a new trial on the grounds that evidence of his extramarital affairs — the parade of women who testified about his infidelities — had been admitted in a way that unfairly prejudiced the jury. With Boney now in the picture, the landscape of the case shifted dramatically. Boney was tried separately and convicted in 2006. He, too, was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

At Camm's second trial in 2006, the defense leaned hard into the Boney connection. Defense attorneys argued that Boney alone had committed the murders — that the DNA evidence placing him at the scene was the definitive answer to who pulled the trigger three times in that Georgetown garage. The prosecution countered that the two men had conspired together, that Camm's motive and the blood spatter evidence still pointed unmistakably to his direct involvement. The second jury convicted him again. Again, life without parole.

And again, a conviction was overturned.

The Indiana Supreme Court reversed the second conviction in 2009, finding that the trial court had again made erroneous evidentiary rulings — this time relating to testimony about Camm's character and the admission of certain evidence that the court found had improperly influenced the jury's deliberations. David Camm walked out of prison in 2009 after nine years of incarceration, released on bond while awaiting a third trial. He moved in with his parents. He maintained, as he had from the very first night, that he was innocent.

The third trial began in 2013, and it was, by any measure, an extraordinary legal proceeding. It was held in Warrick County, Indiana, after a change of venue was granted due to the saturation of pretrial publicity in Floyd County. The trial lasted weeks. Dozens of witnesses testified. The blood spatter evidence — those eight tiny dots on a cotton T-shirt — remained at the absolute center of the prosecution's case, but now it was presented in an environment where both sides had had years to sharpen their arguments and where the jury would hear not just one set of expert opinions but a genuine, detailed scientific debate.

The prosecution's blood spatter experts testified again that the pattern of staining on Camm's shirt was consistent only with high-velocity impact spatter — the kind produced at the moment a bullet strikes a body. They argued, as they had in both previous trials, that this physical evidence directly contradicted Camm's account of finding his family already dead and having had no contact with the blood until he attempted to render aid.

The defense called its own experts, who testified that the spots on the shirt could have an innocent explanation — that transfer during post-shooting contact with victims, or even other sources, could account for the staining. The defense argued, as it had argued before, that Charles Boney's presence at the scene, established by DNA, was the answer the jury needed, and that the State was prosecuting David Camm not because the evidence pointed to him but because investigators had locked onto him early and never sufficiently reconsidered.

The jury also heard about the relationship between Camm and Boney — or, more precisely, heard the prosecution's argument that such a relationship had existed. Boney had, at various points, told investigators that he and Camm had known each other, that Camm had solicited him to carry out the killings. Boney's credibility was, charitably, in question — he had multiple felony convictions, had given inconsistent accounts, and had every incentive to negotiate the terms of his own legal situation by implicating Camm. Defense attorneys attacked him forcefully. But prosecutors argued that the physical evidence, independent of anything Boney said, established Camm's guilt.

Then there was the evidence about the children.

Forensic examination of Jill Camm, who was five years old, had revealed evidence that she had been sexually abused. This finding, which had emerged during the original investigation, became relevant to the theory of the case in a deeply painful way. Prosecutors argued at trial that David Camm was responsible for the abuse of his own daughter, and that when Kim discovered it, the marriage reached its catastrophic end. The defense strenuously contested both the finding and its attribution. The jury heard this testimony and had to weigh it along with everything else.

After weeks of evidence and arguments, the jury in Warrick County deliberated and returned verdicts of guilty on all three counts of murder. David Camm was convicted for the third time of killing his wife Kim, his son Bradley, and his daughter Jill. The judge sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The appeals that followed the third conviction did not succeed in overturning the verdict. Camm's legal team argued constitutional and evidentiary grounds, and the case wound through the Indiana appellate system. The Indiana Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction. As of the most recent available legal record, the conviction stands, and David Camm is serving three consecutive life sentences at an Indiana correctional facility.

He has never stopped proclaiming his innocence. In interviews conducted after his conviction, he maintained that Charles Boney killed his family, that investigators made up their minds about him too early, and that the blood spatter evidence was misrepresented and misunderstood. His supporters — and he has retained them, even after three guilty verdicts — have continued to press his case in public forums and online, arguing that a man cannot be guilty simply because a jury says he is.

That is, of course, not quite the right framing, and it is worth sitting with what a jury actually did — three times, in different venues, with different compositions of twelve ordinary citizens who listened carefully and came to the same conclusion. Three separate juries, in 2002, 2006, and 2013, heard the evidence against David Camm and decided, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he killed his wife and children. Two of those verdicts were set aside not because the evidence was insufficient but because of legal errors in how the trials were conducted — errors that said nothing about Camm's guilt or innocence and everything about the difficulty of managing an extraordinarily complex case through the machinery of the justice system.

What is left, after all of that, is what is always left in cases like this: the loss at the center of it. Three people died in a garage in Georgetown, Indiana, on a September night, and whatever the full truth of what happened in those final moments, their deaths were real and their lives were finite and the people who loved them have had to carry that weight through twenty-three years and three trials and more public scrutiny than any grieving family should ever have to endure. Kim Camm's parents, her siblings, the people who raised her and grew up alongside her, had to sit in courtroom after courtroom and hear their daughter, their sister described in clinical and sometimes brutal forensic terms. Bradley and Jill were seven and five. They were going to grow up and become someone. They never got the chance.

There is a version of true crime that treats the machinery of the legal system — the reversals, the new suspects, the forensic debates — as a kind of entertainment, a puzzle to be solved. This case resists that framing, or ought to. The complexity of the David Camm case, the years and the trials and the expert witnesses, exists because three human beings were shot to death, and the legal system, for all its imperfections, was trying to answer for that. It answered, finally, in 2013, when a jury came back with three verdicts, and the answer it gave was that David Camm is responsible.

He sits in an Indiana prison today, maintaining his innocence, as he has for more than two decades. The verdict of three juries says otherwise. The eight tiny spots on a cotton T-shirt, and what they meant about where David Camm was standing on the night of September 28, 2000, were, in the end, enough — enough to convince the people asked to decide, three separate times, that the man who called 911 was not a father who came home to tragedy but the author of it.

Kim, Bradley, and Jill deserved better than what happened to them in that garage. That much is not in dispute. That much has never been in dispute. It is the one thing, in a case defined by argument and counter-argument, by reversals and rehearings, by experts arrayed against experts, about which everyone, across all three trials, across all the years, has agreed.