Opinion ID: 1692959
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 18

Heading: Sufficiency of Evidence to Support Inevitable Discovery

Text: Soukharith also argues that the State failed to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that the crime scene inevitably would have been discovered. We disagree. Mott, the FBI agent in charge of the investigation, admitted that he talked with Puls on May 24, 1995, about the location of the body and relied on the information that Puls gave him in conducting the search. Mott had, however, started his investigation on May 23, the day Karen disappeared. He knew that a series of calls had been placed on Karen's cellular phone, so his first step was to subpoena records for that phone. The records indicated that Karen's last phone call was picked up by an Omaha cell tower at 49th and F Streets at about 10:47 a.m. By the evening of May 23, Mott had reduced the area of the search to a narrow corridor along I-80 from the western edge of Omaha to the point where Soukharith was arrested in Wyoming. Mott made this determination based upon the location of the last telephone call, the point of arrest, and the difference between the time when the call was placed and the time when the arrest was made. Mott testified that it would have taken Soukharith approximately 8 to 9 hours to get from Omaha to the point where he was arrested. Since the call picked up by the cell tower in Omaha was made at 10:47 a.m. and Soukharith was stopped in Wyoming at about 6:30 p.m., Mott considered it unlikely that Soukharith had gone far off the Interstate to dispose of anything. Moreover, other information was available for Mott to further narrow the search. On May 23, 1995, Paul Schmitz, who regularly commutes between Omaha and Lincoln, saw a white Mitsubishi 3000 GT with Polk County, Iowa, license plates pulled over on the side of the eastbound lane of I-80, about 1,000 feet from the Platte River bridge on the west side of the river. He saw a person he described as an African-American male in his early twenties by the car, who was watching a white woman in her forties walk down into the ditch. Later that night, Schmitz saw a news broadcast concerning the incident and immediately called the FBI and reported what he had seen. He was not interviewed by the FBI until May 26, but Mott testified that a summary of what Schmitz had seen was available to the FBI on May 24. Mott testified that although there was no  `X' marks the spot, leads provided by witnesses such as Schmitz would have narrowed the focus, and that was where the most intensive efforts would have begun. Mott testified that law enforcement would have conducted a search. Mott was prepared to use at least four aircraft in the search. He would have contacted the Omaha Police Division, the Nebraska State Patrol, and the Douglas and Sarpy Counties police, and enlisted the help of the National Guard if necessary. Mott also had undertaken steps to enlist public assistance. A great deal of publicity concerning Karen's disappearance, including pictures of both her and the car, was being generated in Des Moines, and similar efforts were being made in Omaha. Thus, testimony at the suppression hearing indicates that Mott had initiated an independent investigation in Nebraska that in no way relied on Puls' unlawful interrogation in Wyoming. The search had been reduced to a narrow corridor along I-80 from Omaha to Wyoming. Mott's testimony indicates that Schmitz' report would further have focused the search on an area around where the Interstate crosses the Platte River in Sarpy County. The search would have been extensive, enlisting the help of numerous law enforcement agencies and the public at large. Based on this testimony, the trial judge's finding that the crime scene would have been found by May 26, 1993, and its evidentiary value retained is not clearly wrong.