The Murders of David and Carol Keeffe: Suspect and Arrest
Boots
On the day his house was searched, DeSisti was taken to the Athens Township Municipal Building twice, where he was questioned in an ongoing police interview. When confronted with information that his supposedly missing Smith & Wesson .22-caliber handgun had been found by police inside his house, DeSisti reportedly became nervous and told his interrogators that his wife had given him the gun prior to their marriage. He later contradicted that statement and claimed that the gun had been given to him by his grandfather. He said it was the only handgun he'd ever owned. The detectives duly noted the inconsistencies of his statements.
Earlier in the investigation, a PSP shoe-impression expert had compared the photographs of the bloody boot prints left by the perpetrator as he exited the crime scene to those in a database of footwear images. A match was not made at the time, and the impression expert set about trying to find a match by making inquiries at local footwear stores, also to no avail. After the search at DeSisti's home and the identification of the brand of boots that he seemed to prefer, the expert realized that the footwear-impression database had not come up with a match because it had not included Cabela's Outfitter series boots in its data. When the expert compared the bloody footprint photographs with the Cabela Outfitter boots that DeSisti had been wearing on the day of the search of his home, he found that those boots, along with two other pairs of boots of the same type seized from his basement, matched, according to a grand jury finding of facts. The expert concluded that any of the three pairs of boots, including the pair that DeSisti had been wearing, could have left the bloody footprints at the crime scene.