It looked like a routine traffic accident, until a patrolman with no forensic training suspected something worse.

But he couldn't prove it until a bent steering wheel, a security camera and a physics calculation showed what really led to a young woman's death.

Highway Patrolman Tony Snyder was heading home after finishing his night shift when he got a call about a traffic accident on Route 95 just outside of Princeton, Minnesota.

It was maybe 10 miles from my house, so I said I would do it.

When Snyder arrived, he saw that there had been a two vehicle accident. Apparently, a Jeep collided with an abandoned car that had broken down and was parked on the side of the highway.

When I was met by the deputy, he informed me that one person is deceased, the female passenger in the red Jeep.

And the other vehicle that was struck was unoccupied. I could see the ambulance personnel working on a mail who was covered in blood and he was screaming.

The Jeep driver, Steve Holerman, was rushed to a nearby hospital. Steve's passenger, his 41-year-old wife, Deborah, was dead.

Everybody knew her. I mean, she was that well-loved. It was just disbelief and shock.

If you got to know a damn, you liked them. She was the life of the party. She was somebody that people gathered around because she was fun to be with.

Steve Holerman survived the crash with only minor injuries and toxicology tests revealed no drugs or alcohol in his system.

He told investigators that he and Deborah were on their way home from shopping when he inadvertently drove off the highway and struck a parked car.

I said, do you remember what you hit? He said, I hit a car. I said, do you know where the car was? He said, yes, it was on the shoulder.

I said, did you see the car when you hit it? He said, yes, I saw the tail lights.

And I then asked him if he tried to maneuver the vehicle or break to avoid collision and he said, that he didn't have time to do that.

The right front end of Steve's Jeep hit the back left side of the parked car.

Steve said he was driving approximately 60 miles an hour at the time of the accident and he was wearing his seatbelt, but Deborah was not.

That was out of her character. She was pretty religious about wearing seatbelts and made a point to everyone else that they needed to have theirs on also.

At Deborah's autopsy, the medical examiner found skull fractures and evidence that her brain had been jolted violently inside her skull from side to side.

The finding of the pathologist that did the autopsy was that the death was a result of a motor vehicle accident.

The blunt force trauma and the injuries that were observed, the skull fracture, the bruising of the brain, any of those could have been consistent and would have been consistent with being killed in a motor vehicle crash.

Although Petrolman Tony Snyder wasn't a doctor or formerly trained in forensic science, he couldn't believe the coroner's report.

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