–
Rennison said the shop’s co-owner, Beth Wilburn, and her boyfriend, Tommy McGraw were both shot and stabbed multiple times with a screwdriver. An electrician, James Oatis, was also shot. The murders occurred on Nov.2, but the bodies weren’t discovered until Nov. 3 when Wilburn’s business partner, Bob Currie, opened the business.
Oatis was not an employee of the shop, but had been hired to hang lights in the shop area of the business. Rennison said Oatis wasn’t even supposed to be in the shop the night of the murders. Rennison said he was scheduled to do the work the night before, had to cancel because he didn’t have enough gas in his truck to make the trip to League City at the time.
“What you want to look at a murder scene is who is the last person to be there?” said Rennison. “By Dean’s own admission, he was the last person to be there.” “We found a person who had not been interviewed in the in the original investigation, and this person was a former roommate of Dean and they were good friends in high school,” said Rennison. “If he was roommates with Dean then he needs to be interviewed, and it just slipped through the cracks of the original investigation.”
Krogman’s information became even more vital to the investigation after test results were conducted at the FBI lab in Quantico, Va. on bullet slugs pulled from the victims. Rennison said the hairs on the back of his neck stood-up when he got a call from the FBI firearms examiner. Allen said they also confirmed Wilburn stayed late because Currie had a date and McGraw was coming to pick her up after work. Allen said they also learned Wilburn received a call at 7:30pm from an angry customer who was complaining about shoddy work performed by Kersh on their corvette.
“Everybody’s got a breaking point, fortunately 99.9% of us don’t make it to that point, but apparently Dean hit a threshold,” said Rennison. “An easy speculation is to say that fired him and he didn’t want to be fired.” “The thing with cold cases is they come to you in different forms and this one came with 40 years of investigative leads and statements. You know, people have heard this or that on the street,” said Petroff. “The fear was we had boxes of evidence, 40 years of just random tips; other suspects, there were allegations of maybe these murders were drug related, maybe it was a cartel hit, maybe it was some other love triangle that wasn’t really clear from the evidence.