Within Arms Reach

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

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Now, Charlie's sober.

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We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah, aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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A police officer and his estranged wife have a fight in their bedroom.

A shotgun goes off.

He says it was suicide.

Investigators said it was murder.

There's only two people that know, and one can't speak with us.

It took ballistics, a last will, and the physics of a shot cup pedal to tell what really happened in the bedroom that day.

In the desolate beauty of northwest New Mexico, the city of Farmington is one of the few green spots.

The streets are generally quiet.

Traffic problems are usually handled by police on motorcycles.

Paul Dunn used to be one of those officers.

I loved my job.

I always used to say there was only two things I was good at.

It was being a traffic cop

and being a dad.

And I enjoyed most all the simplicity of being a motor cop because everything you do in accident investigation, accident reconstruction, is just math.

Cliff Olam worked alongside Paul Dunn.

He was a good motor officer, good police officer, took his job, you know, real serious.

Paul was married to Monica Sanchez Sanchez-Donn, and together the couple had two children.

She was singularly the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen in my life.

But after several years of marriage, there were problems.

Monica discovered Paul was having an affair with another woman, and the couple separated.

Early on the morning of April 4th, 1994, Cliff Olin was on duty and heard a police radio call about a shooting at Paul and Monica's house.

I saw Paul performing CPR on Monica and he was just covered in blood.

Monica was rushed to the hospital, but it was too late.

She was pronounced dead on arrival with a gunshot wound to her abdomen.

Paul told police he went to the house to have breakfast with his daughters.

As he walked in, Monica was just about ready to leave for work.

When they met, tempers flared.

She said, I'm filing charges on you.

And I said,

what?

She said, I'm filing charges on you for battery.

And then she stormed off down

through the living room and down the hallway and into the bedroom and slammed the bedroom door.

Paul followed Monica to the bedroom.

Paul said he picked her up, ran to the garage garage to drive her to the hospital, but he wasn't sure there was enough time.

I felt her shudder, and I knew what that meant.

His friends on the police force didn't believe the suicide story.

You know, I suppose

anything's possible, but I always have that philosophy.

There's only two people that know, and one can't speak with us.

Investigators needed to analyze the forensic evidence in the bedroom to determine whether Paul's incredible story was true.

Since Paul Dunn was a Farmington police officer, his wife's suspicious death was assigned to another department, the New Mexico State Police.

Investigators couldn't find any usable fingerprints on the shotgun.

And they removed the back wall containing the shotgun pellets for later analysis.

In Monica's van, investigators found a domestic violence complaint form.

Just the day before her death, Monica had gone into police headquarters to have photographs taken of injuries she said Paul inflicted during a beating.

She had a bruise on her cheek, she had a bruise on her thigh, and a couple of other places on her legs.

She was going to file these battery charges and that was going to cost him his job.

When police photographed Monica's injuries, they violated standard procedure.

A witness said a male officer photographed Monica's injuries alone in his office with the blinds closed.

They would have a woman officer come in and take the photos, and he didn't do that.

And he didn't have anybody in the room with them.

It was just him and Monica.

So they're alone, and it took him about 10 minutes to do these photos.

So there's kind of questions on what happened in that room during that 10 minutes.

At Monica's autopsy, the pathologist noted two abrasions near the entrance wound, identical to those caused by a shotgun.

Unlike a rifle, a shotgun fires several projectiles at once.

In this case, nine pellets.

A plastic cup with four equally spaced cuts holds the pellets together in the shell.

When fired, this shot cup opens like a flower with four petals.

Since the shot cup opened before entering Monica's body, this meant that the muzzle was one to three feet away from Monica's body.

From muzzle to trigger, the gun was 29 inches long.

If the muzzle was 12 to 24 inches away from her abdomen, Monica's arms would have had to be almost twice as long to pull the trigger.

Paul vehemently denied killing his wife and offered to take a lie detector test.

Did you ever physically injure Monica?

No.

Did Monica shoot herself while you were standing more than six feet away from her?

Yes.

The results?

Paul passed the polygraph.

But based on the forensic evidence, he was arrested and charged with murder.

Since he was a police officer, he was separated from the rest of the prison population.

I was locked up 23 and a half hours a day, seven days a week, for eight and a half months.

I paced an X in the paint and the floor.

The police department turned against him.

Paul hired a family friend, Victor Titus, to defend him.

Ironically, Titus had been a pallbearer at Monica's funeral, and he couldn't understand why the family asked him.

I mean, they're very, very family-oriented, and they would have picked folks solely within the family.

And it wasn't just me, but the other folks that were in the,

as pallbearers as well, let me know that those are hand-chosen by Monica somehow and it just didn't feel right

but how could Monica have chosen her pallbearers if she was dead Titus suspected Monica had left a suicide note and that it had been withheld from the defense

at a pre-trial hearing Titus demanded to know whether a suicide note existed Mr.

Sanchez Monica's father was in the courtroom and Judge Rich asked him directly He stood up and said, yes, I have something at home in my file cabinet.

Monica had given the note to a family member almost a month before her death.

It named pallbearers for her funeral and designated who should get her belongings when she died.

I now realize life isn't fair.

Most of the time, it seems very cruel.

Please tell the girls I love them very much.

I know they will grieve.

I'm really sorry about this.

I just don't have any more strength or power to go on.

Prosecutors said the note didn't say anything about suicide.

It was Monica's last will and testament.

Prosecutors refused to drop the case based on the forensic evidence.

It would be left to a jury to decide

whether Monica Dunn's death was a suicide

or cold-blooded murder.

In preparation for trial, Paul Dunn's defense team hired Dave Pfeffer, a private investigator with 20 years of police experience, to examine the crime scene.

The evidence showed that the shotgun pellets went through Monica's body, through the sheetrock, and hit the brick wall and wooden studs beneath.

Pfeffer conducted a crude experiment.

We lined up the indentations and the marks on the 2x4 with the indentations on the brick.

and ran them straight in a line and it indicated to us that the line, all three lines, came directly to the foot, actually about a foot into the water waterbed itself.

This contradicted the state's theory that Monica was standing when shot.

For a more detailed ballistic examination, Pfeffer contacted Nelson Welch, the former chief firearms investigator for the New Mexico Crime Lab.

In examining the autopsy photographs, Welch noticed a substance called Grex in and around Monica's wound.

Now, Grex is the white buffering material that's loaded in with the double-ot buck

to prevent them from being deformed when they're shot at high pressure.

But Welch was troubled by the fact he could find no Grex on the outside of Monica's dress.

Welch test-fired a shotgun into ballistic gelatin covered with a cloth about two feet away, which is where prosecutors say Paul was standing with the shotgun.

The Grex coats the outside of the material.

None of this was on the outside of the dress at the entry hole.

There was a large amount of Grex on the inside of the dress, both on the front and on the back,

intermingled with the blood.

And so almost all of the Grex that I could find had entered the wound.

There was none outside.

The absence of Grex on the outside of Monica's dress told Welch that the gun was pressed against Monica's abdomen and wasn't two feet away when fired.

Dr.

Martin Fackler, a career Army surgeon who had been the military's expert on gunshot wounds, also examined the autopsy photographs.

Prosecution experts identified two shot cup petal impressions on Monica's skin, proving, they say, that the gun was two feet away.

Vackler says, if the gun was two feet away, all four petals would have been visible, each 90 degrees from one another.

Vackler says, this second impression didn't line up properly with where a shot petal mark would occur.

But this is, oh, 20 or more degrees off from where it would have to be if it were a shot petal.

And besides, it doesn't look like a shot petal mark because there's a little mark that most certainly is the front sight.

And so they just misinterpreted that.

Precise measurements matched this impression to the bead sight of the muzzle of the shotgun.

Paul Dunn's defense experts were convinced that the gun was against Monica's stomach when it went off.

But regardless of the gun's position, they would still need to prove that Paul Dunn did not pull the trigger.

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Monica Dunn's family insisted that their son-in-law, Paul, be held in prison without bail until the murder trial.

He didn't see his daughters, and he was fired from the police force.

They broke me.

They broke me.

Eight and a half months of solitary confinement will break anybody.

He decided that if he were convicted, he would kill himself rather than do hard time.

He did keep part of a plastic razor.

He got rid of the plastic part of the razor and just kept, you know, the little tiny razor.

And he just decided, you know, he was not going to go to prison because what, you know, inmates do to cops in prison.

At the trial, prosecutors presented their theory that Paul shot Monica from two feet away while both were standing.

The defense presented a very different version of events.

In the courtroom, they recreated Monica's bedroom using the actual bed and wall.

Nelson Welch showed the jury that the path of the shotgun pellets were inconsistent with the prosecution's theory.

We would start at the brick wall, that is where the pellet impacted.

Where it came from,

from the sheetrock, the angle is downward.

and slightly towards the bed.

From the brick wall, through the sheetrock, to the exit wound in Monica's back, to the entrance wound, to the muzzle.

The lines converge much lower than prosecutors say.

The only way to get all of these lined up is in the position in which we have it now.

Which meant that Monica was sitting on the bed with the butt of the shotgun resting on the bed when it went off.

which was consistent with Paul's original statement to police.

Using a model the same size as Monica, the defense showed that Monica could have easily reached the trigger by leaning forward.

The evidence showed that the gun was upside down and pointed upward, making it virtually impossible for Paul to have pulled the trigger.

It had to have been down at the foot of the bed.

It had to be down low in order to reach the trigger because it's way down on the bed.

And Monica would have had to have allowed that gun to be pointed into her stomach area at contact

while all this was going on.

Nelson Welch was so convinced of Paul's innocence, he made an unusual promise to a colleague.

I made a comment to her, if I was wrong on this case, I would never work another farms case in my life.

Paul's first wife and girlfriend both testified in court that he had never been physically abusive.

The jury had to decide between two competing theories.

Whether Monica killed herself

or whether Paul shot her standing two feet away.

The jury reached a verdict within minutes.

They all indicated, they went in, they took an initial vote.

They all agreed it was a not guilty, and everybody went to the bathroom, combed their hair, and basically killed

because they were afraid that the judge was going to be mad at them if they didn't take a little time.

The prosecution has the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

And in this case, it was the defense who proved innocence, not just beyond a reasonable doubt.

They proved it beyond all doubt, as far as I'm concerned.

Paul Dunn didn't return to his job on the police force, and he now works as a foreman for an oil company.

He says this case changed many of his long-held beliefs.

As a cop, he used to believe everyone in prison was guilty, and although he denies ever hitting his wife,

he concedes his infidelity brought some of these problems on himself.

You don't go to jail for singing too loud in church.

You can bleep this out.

Was I an hole?

Yeah.

Am I proud

of the person I was then?

No.

Did I know the difference?

No.

It's the mentality that police officers assume by the nature of the beast.

The question remained, why did Monica commit suicide?

Many believe she simply couldn't stand losing Paul to another another woman, despite evidence she had been unfaithful herself.

Medical records show Monica had an abortion during her marriage, long after Paul had a vasectomy.

Just how Monica got the bruises remains unknown.

And the letter she left behind raises more questions.

The bruises on me will show.

She writes that a month before her death.

How do you know a month before you die that you're going to have bruises on your body?

Statements like that just make it look like not only did she plan to kill herself, but she planned to set him up to, you know, be charged with murder.

A misinterpretation of the crime scene almost sent Paul Dunn to prison for life.

But a more complete forensic examination ultimately set him free.

I was scared to death because they're Big Brother.

My pockets were tapped and my father's pockets were tapped and Big Brother has

endless supplies

and

they were trying, they wanted to put me in prison for the rest of my life

and knowing that I didn't do it

didn't

didn't make it easier for me to sit through the trial.

I was scared to death.

The most difficult thing

for people to do is to say, I made a mistake.

And they just never, I don't know that they will do it today.

But the jury sure found out that they made a mistake.