The March 12th, 19, March 12th, 19, March 12th 1999, Dr. David Tipton approached his home in Decatur, Alabama, a little bit earlier than usual.

He and his housewife, Karen, had plans to go to the theater that evening.

As he hung up his coach in the

foyer. He shouted to let Karen know that he was home. This is a big house, he later explained.

I did call for her. She should have been there with the children. At that point, I saw a drop of

blood. One small drop of blood on the foyer, on the tile. The next thing I saw was more blood in the foyer on the tile.

The next thing I saw was more blood in the foyer, toward the door, and I walked up the stairs and was the most surprised person on the face of the earth to get to the top and find a dead

body there that looked somewhat like Karen.

Through the shock and gore of it all, David Tipton had a hard time

recognizing the body of his 39-year-old wife, but it was, unfortunately, Karen. She had been

stripped and stabbed over 28 times, and then her throat had been cut. She was in the prime of her

life, David later said. She was prettier

than she'd ever been in her life. Decatur had never seen quite a murder like this, and the

brutality that had been Karen's final moments shocked the community. Investigators rushed to

the scene to immediately begin looking for clues, desperate to put

Karen's surviving family and Decatur residents back at ease by ridding the streets of a savage

killer. David was left to pick up the pieces.

The worst day of my life was about a week after the murder, he said, and that was when

Catherine, then three years old, asked me when

mommy was coming back from heaven. The investigators honed in on their prime suspect at the

time, David himself, but David had an alibi. Karen answered a phone call around one o'clock

and usually picked up the children around 2.30, but she hadn't

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