The relentless Midwestern heat had already done part of that job. By Saturday night, August 2, the 85-degree-plus temperatures had taken such a toll on Kopitske's body that authorities first thought he died of natural causes.

"You'd think a shotgun to the back of the head would just blow the head all over the room," Verwiel told Stuff magazine. "But ... at first glance it didn't look like it was going to be a gun type wound. There were also some marks on his body that were suspicious but they weren't clearly identified through the decomposition. Through the autopsy, those marks were identified as three stab wounds. Two through the back and one to the front."

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It wasn't until Monday, when a pathologist in Milwaukee rolled the body over and noticed liquefied brain tissue leaking through a quarter-sized wound in the back of the head, that authorities knew that Kopitske had been shot to death. They realized that those peculiar marks on his back and chest were nearly bloodless stab wounds, inflicted after he was already dead.

The sheer brutality of the crime, it seemed, was the only clue investigators had to go on, so they kept the details to themselves. Perhaps, investigators theorized, the two distinct types of wounds meant there was more than one killer. Maybe the savagery of the attack itself, savagery motivated possibly by some deep psychopathic rage — "hatred" was the only word Verwiel could find to describe it — had fueled the killing. The fact that the killer had taken Kopitske's car keys bolstered that theory, Verwiel said. From the very beginning, "I had an inkling that the keys were taken as a trophy," he told Stuff Magazine.

The physical search of the murder scene turned up nothing to advance the case, so investigators fanned out to canvass the neighborhood. "We ... created ... about five working models of what this might be and worked on each of those working models to either prove or disprove those, and then constantly tried to field tips from citizens," Verwiel said.

As the days went on, it seemed that the process was almost as fruitless as their theorizing. It didn't become clear until later, however, that that the canvassing of the neighborhood had not been a waste of time. One neighbor, authorities later said, offered what would prove to be a crucial clue. According to court records, the neighbor claimed that a few nights earlier he had seen "an older car with square headlights and rectangular taillights" cruising down Arrowhead Lane "flashing a light from the vehicle and appearing to look at fire numbers of three residences on the dead-end street." Someone, it seemed, had seen Hirte and Eric cruising the neighborhood, "shining for deer," as they had called it.

It would be months before authorities finally identified the car which placed the accused killer at the scene of the crime.

The breakthrough didn't come as a result of savvy police work, though there was a lot of it during the six-month probe. It wasn't the product of high-tech forensic science either, though that too would later play a part.

Within days of the crime, the investigation hit a dead end, said Jorgensen. Glenn Kopitske's accused killer might never have been identified if, as Stuff Magazine put it, he had not made the same mistake that every man since Adam has made: He told his secret to the wrong woman.

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