The neighbor, Richard Detlor, was a friend, someone Imhoff had known
back in Madison, where the Detlors still lived for part of the year.
Whenever the Detlors went back to Wisconsin, Imhoff would look in on
their house, something he did for many of his neighbors.
It is impossible to know whether, on that August afternoon, Imhoff ever
saw the stranger in the house with the .22 caliber revolver; all we know
for sure is that Imhoff was shot in the head. When Telvick and a friend
found him that evening, he was lying in a pool of blood, dead.
The killer turned out to be a man named Billy Ray Retherford, who was on the lam after killing a woman
two weeks earlier and was hiding in the Detlors’ empty home. The next
day, Retherford was killed in a shootout with the police. He was using
the same .22 handgun.
The gun, however, was not his. It belonged to Richard Detlor, who,
according to the police report, had left it, loaded, in the nightstand
by his bed before departing for Wisconsin several months earlier.
When Imhoff’s murder was brought to my attention recently, I was stunned
that a supposedly “responsible gun owner” would leave a loaded gun in a
house that was empty for months at a time. Yes, the odds of someone
breaking into the house and using the gun were small, but they weren’t
zero. That the Detlors didn’t take the simple precaution of unloading
their gun and locking it up struck me as incredibly negligent.
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