What happened to the gun that was used to shoot Julia Scyphers?

tl;dr version

It's sometimes interesting to rearrange the story to add suspense or mystery, but I'll do the exact opposite. Trigger man William Bowman, at some point, gave the murder weapon back to Brett Kimberlin. Next, some time in fall 1978, Brett buried it one night in the Texas yard of Julia Scyphers' daughter Louise, in hopes of framing her (or her husband) for his own crimes. Kimberlin had also buried a bunch of his unused explosives and bomb parts along with the murder weapon, so he also tried to frame her for that - but, we'll come back to the bombings in later posts.

Murder weapon turned over to law enforcement

Louise, for her part, wasn't as dumb as Kimberlin hoped everyone would be. On March 10, 1979, she raked up a plastic bag full of bomb parts and the rifle while she was doing yardwork. She immediately got in contact with law enforcement, resulting in the ATF coming to her home to collect a gym bag full of bomb parts, including Tovex packages with deliberately defaced serial codes, as well as a Colt AR-15 with the serial number filed off. For various reasons, the law enforcement agents had to quietly sit on this evidence for a couple of years, with Kimberlin meanwhile unaware of exactly whether law enforcement had even found out about the incriminating bag.

Brett Kimberlin's first framing attempts underway

Kimberlin, meanwhile, had already previously begun his attempts to get law enforcement chasing Louise's family for both the Scypher murder and the bombings. For example, when he was arrested (alongside William Bowman, as it happened) in February 1979 due to a different part of his prolific crime spree, Kimberlin had a long interview with law enforcement in which he encouraged agents to look into Louise's household in relation to the Scyphers murder. Indeed, for 1978 and 1979, it seems to have been Kimberlin's main hope to blame his recent violent crimes on Louise and her husband, perhaps in part because he had correctly inferred that they were able to give law enforcement valuable evidence helping to establish Brett Kimberlin's guilt. Again, more on this in later posts.

Cold case murder

Now, Brett Kimberlin and William Bowman never ended up facing charges for the Julia Scyphers murder. The problem is that the sole closeup eyewitness to Bowman's visit was Fred Scyphers, and he died of cancer before the case could be brought to trial. Therefore, prosecutors focused on getting Kimberlin for his bombs and other crimes instead.

In court

Over time, Kimberlin offered the courts a series of different false stories of how someone else may have actually had possession of Brett's bomb-making materials, but none of these were believed and he got convicted anyway. For the courts, he ended up forgetting his attempt to frame Louise's family, possibly because his lawyers were smart enough to see that it couldn't possibly work. But then, to the total surprise of Brett Kimberlin and his defense team, in the 1981 trial that convicted him, the government suddenly brought witnesses, including Louise and a drug wholesaler who was actually in the car with Kimberlin when Kimberlin surreptitiously crept into Louise's neighborhood late one night with his bag. The framing attempt was now front and center and helped put together better chain of custody explanations for his bombing crimes (which, again, I will handle in separate articles). The point about the AR-15 being included in the buried bag was not belabored in court because the government was focused on winning on the bombing charges and did not want to risk losing on the bombing charges by connecting them to the shooting incident that no longer had a living eyewitness.

About that AR-15

On page 174 of Brett Kimberlin's own authorized biography, writer Mark Singer caught Kimberlin saying something he couldn't have possibly known unless he actually planted the bombs and weapons in Louise's yard. You see, I told the history more or less in chronological order, but that's not the order Singer had to learn it in. Interviewing about the trial, on page 174, Kimberlin unthinkingly complained to his authorized biographer that Indianapolis Star newspaper writer Gelarden had written about a report "that the Scyphers murder weapon was buried in the Crosbys' backyard." One problem with Brett's complaint is that nobody had written about the murder weapon being buried. (In fact, as far as I could tell, there are no suggestions in the press that Kimberlin ever knew anything specific about the murder weapon until Kimberlin accidentally admitted here to Singer that he knew where it had ended up.) Singer re-checked every newspaper article and found no reference to the murder weapon ever being buried. And, remember, the Scyphers murder wasn't even discussed in Brett Kimberlin's bombing trial, only the bombings. Witnesses provided testimony about how forensic evidence tied the bomb related contents of the buried gym bag to the Speedway Bombings. They didn't mention anything connecting the rifle in the bag to the Scyphers murder. As Singer put it, "When a person claims to know where a murder weapon is buried, even if he's trying to finger someone else, what does that imply?" (page 175). Oops.

Conclusion

Brett Kimberlin tells too many lies to keep them all straight.

There is no statute of limitations on murder in Indiana.