Fitness tracker offers alibi for people in the girlfriend of the girlfriend

Millions of people wear a Fitbit or a kind of physical tracking device to log their exercises and their sleeping habits, but when a man from Wisconsin wore one, he never suspected that an alibi would deliver it and save him from murdering systems in the brutal death of his girlfriend.

The case, which was brought to justice in Green Bay, Wisconsin in February 2018, is one of the first of many of many in which High -Tech devices can not only provide decisive evidence in criminal proceedings, but can also prevent illegal convictions.

On May 21, 2016, Doug Detrie's girlfriend and mother of his little son, 31-year-old Nicole Vander Heyden, was beaten and strangled to death, a little more than three miles from the house they shared. The then 35 -year -old Detry had only been with her a few hours earlier. They had visited a steel panther concert, followed by drinking and dancing.

When the couple was separated, Vander Heyden went to a local bar named The Sardine Can and expected Detry to follow. When Detrie could not show, Vander Heyden sent angry texts in which he accused of flirting with other women. Around 12:30 p.m. Vander Heyden, now drunk and angry, went out of the bar and was never seen alive by her friends.

Detry and a friend drove around and searched for Vander Heyden, then went home, smoked marijuana and, as he later told the police, went to sleep. He waited until 4:30 a.m. this afternoon that she was found for hours after her body in this area.

The detectives of the Sheriff of Brown County surveyed Detry and later received a search command for the couple's house. The blood was found on the garage floor and in Vander Heyden's car, so that the investigators wondered whether the missing woman had actually come home and had been killed by Detry, who then used her car to transport the body to the field.

A day later, the suspicion was deepened when a neighbor found a blood pool and a string on the other side of the street, the investigators believed that they may have been used to strangle the victim. Lead Detective Sergeant Brian Slinger wondered if “there was a kind of argument between her and Doug, maybe when she came home and that … somehow landed on the street”.

At that point, Detry was the logical suspect, although he denied that he had killed Vander Heyden. He was arrested and imprisoned, but the investigators wanted to wait for the results of laboratory tests before accused him of murder.

These charges never came.

Detry was released from prison for less than three weeks later after testing that the blood in the car was not that of the victim, the blood on the ground was not human and a part of a non -identified man was found on her clothing and cord.

In addition, Detry seemed to have an unconventional alibi tools: the Fitbit he was wearing when Vander Heyden was missing. Slinger said that he and others noticed that Detrie had carried the personal tracking device on the left wrist when he was first questioned by the police at home. When the data was downloaded and examined on this device, Detry seemed to be deleted.

“He had over a few steps all night,” said Singer, “… to get on the bathroom, after the baby, whatever. His story he told us was absolutely 100 percent true.”

There was another device that also seemed to support Detries innocence: an insurance company that was installed as a snapshot called Snapshot called Vander Heyden's car. The information downloaded from Snapshot showed that your car had not been driven that night.

But if Detrie did not kill Vander Heyden, who did it? Whose DNA was left on her clothes and the cord killed her? As it turns out, the technology of the 21st century would also help answer these questions.

In August 2016, the investigators were able to restore enough of the non -identified male DNA from one of the victim's socks to send to the national database, and soon they had a name: George Steven Burch.

And when Brown County's Sheriff would soon find out that Nicole Vander Heyden was murdered in the early morning hours, Burch had borne a phone with him, which contained a treasury.

There is a program on his phone that is known as Google Dashboard. The dashboard not only collects mobile tower data, but also follows every Wi-Fi hotspot that the telephone encounters and GPS coordinates. The information about Burch's phone showed that on May 21, 2016 he was everywhere or very close to the place where Vander Heyden was.

He started the night in a bar that was seen half a mile by her last. He was eight miles in her house for an hour, then he was on the field on which her body was found, and even in a place on the highway where some of her possessions had been thrown away.

Slinger was sure that he had his husband, and in September 2016 George Burch was charged with Nicole Vander Heyden's intentional murder.

It would still be a long, cure path to justice. In his process in February, Burch and his lawyers asked serious questions about the reliability of the fitbits and the other devices and argued that the prosecutors were too far -being based on unpainted technology. In addition, Burch admits that these devices could show that he was with Vander Heyden, not show who actually killed them.

And he says the murderer is Doug Detry, the same man who was initially suspected.

With all the new technology used in this case, justice for Nicole Vander Heyden would still determine a jury in an old -fashioned way.

Would you make a retirement cruise?

The artist creates massive designs that are only visible

Katy Perry's concert piece malfunctions and almost falls into the crowd