Alfred failed to call the police, he says, because there were teenagers in the neighborhood who were always "raising hell," and he didn't want to get them in trouble. Only later did it occur to him that Paul might have been involved.

Alfred also remembered a disturbing conversation he had with Paul a couple of months earlier. Alfred had been working in his large yard and was walking back toward his house when Paul stopped him and said he needed to talk. Paul claimed he had recently been approached -- by whom, Alfred can't recall -- about doing some sort of undercover narcotics work for the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office. Paul wanted to know what his father thought of the idea. Alfred's reply was emphatic.

"I told him I didn't think he should have anything to do with it all," says Alfred. "I told him that they would turn on him like a chow dog, and to stay away from it. He said okay, and I never thought any more of it." That is, until a half-dozen members of the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office turned up at his front door the day after Christmas to announce that his son's body had been found.

State law mandates that any time there is a report of a suspicious death in a county without a medical examiner, a justice of the peace must be called to the scene to make a ruling about the cause and manner of death.

In Texas, justice of the peace is an elected post that can be held by a plumber or a used car salesman; there is no requirement that a JP have a law-enforcement background. But Edie Connelly is no law-enforcement wannabe. Before she was first elected as justice of the peace for Montgomery County's Precinct 3 in 1987, Connelly had spent ten years as a peace officer -- the last nine as a detective with the sex crimes division of the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office.

Paul Beauchamp's body was discovered in Connelly's jurisdiction in southern Montgomery County, and it was her responsibility to go to the pond and investigate the scene. When she arrived, the corpse was still in the water. Almost immediately, she doubted that this was simply an accidental drowning.

One of the first things that bothered Connelly was Minnich's story about shooting at turtles -- something she found just short of fantastic. But it was the physical evidence that Connelly found even more troubling.

When the rescue team reached Paul's body, it was in an upright position. Connelly thought that odd, since most drowning victims float face down. Additionally, the body was stiff, and rigor mortis had already set in. Yet, she noted, there was swelling and bruising around the gunshot wounds to the back of the victim's head.

"You're usually not going to have swelling if the body had been dead that long," says Connelly, noting that hemorrhaging is caused by the pumping of blood. If Paul had been dead long enough for rigor mortis to begin to set in -- anywhere from one to seven hours, depending on the conditions -- his heart had obviously ceased to pump blood through his veins by the time Minnich claims to have mistaken him for a turtle. Nor, she adds, would the gunshot wounds have produced much blood, because lividity would have caused the blood in Paul's body to pool in his lower extremities, not his head. At that point, Connelly also believed that Detective Hidalgo shared her misgivings about Minnich's story.

"I left the scene with the impression that this was a homicide investigation," says Connelly. But by the next day, Connelly realized her reading of the sheriff's department's take on the case had been wrong. (Hidalgo, who now works for the Atlanta office of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, refused to comment, saying it would not be proper.)

In his autopsy report, Dr. Vladimir Parungao, a Harris County assistant medical examiner, noted that Beauchamp did have some water in his lungs and a blood alcohol level of 0.26 percent, and downplayed the significance of the bruising and swelling around the two gunshot wounds.

But despite his official ruling of death by accidental drowning, even Parungao was less than certain of his own diagnosis. According to the sheriff's office's report, Parungao was concerned about the hemorrhaging around one of the bullet wounds, and he urged detectives to have Minnich take a lie-detector test in order to eliminate the possibility of foul play.

That same day, Minnich voluntarily submitted to a polygraph examination. Kelly Hendricks of Hendricks Polygraph, Inc. administered the test. The examination and accompanying bull session, which were also videotaped, resembled a conversation between the backwoods sitcom character Gomer Pyle and his auto mechanic cousin, Goober, from Mayberry, RFD, with Minnich telling Hendricks how he liked to make guys with car problems look stupid in front of their girlfriends and wives.