In the Dateline episode ‘As Night Fell’, correspondent Josh Mankiewicz investigates the 2012 shooting of Heidy Aline Truman, a 25-year-old woman who was shot in the head at close range in her Orem home outside Salt Lake City, Utah. Her 30-year-old husband Conrad Truman, who was home at the time of shooting and called 911, was the prime suspect. (The Trumans had two guns in the house.) Prosecutors alleged Truman killed his wife to collect more than $878,000 from a life insurance policy. At Truman’s trial, Orem Police Cpl. William Crook testified that when he arrived at the Truman house and told Truman to step aside so paramedics could treat his wife (she was still breathing), Truman “threatened to kill me and everybody I know if I didn’t save Heidy.” Orem Chief Paramedic Russ Sneddon also testified that Truman was the first and only person to threaten to kill him in his 17 years on the job. In 2014, Conrad Truman was found guilty of killing his wife.
In February 2017, Truman was acquitted of the crime. A judge determined that evidence presented at the trial (a flawed scene diagram) was inaccurate. During the trial, a medical examiner said Heidy could have walked one to one and a half steps after being shot in the head eliminating the possibility of suicide. After the guilty verdict, Conrad Truman’s defense re-investigated the crime scene and found that measurements were off. Heidy’s body was found 2 feet and 4 inches closer (or one and a half steps) to where the gun went off which means a suicide scenario could be possible. Truman’s attorney Ann Taliaferro said of the discovery: “We immediately had what we call an ‘Ah ha’ moment where we understand what happened here.” Dateline airs Fridays at 10pm on NBC.
