Richmond Times-Dispatch Sept. 7, 2003
The supposedly fresh palm print on the porch pillar was "the clincher."
It was the final piece of evidence that proved Dwayne Curd leaped on a Boulevard porch railing on Nov. 7, 2001, and fired a single shotgun blast through a window into the upper body of his sleeping fiancee, Lia Selberis.
That's what Selberis' parents heard when they met with two Richmond "cold case" detectives on June 26 at the Borders bookstore on West Broad Street.
The investigators surprised Bill and Sandy Selberis by saying they were going to take the information to the commonwealth's attorney's office to see if they could finally "clear" the case.
A few days later, Richmond police announced that the high- profile case that had plagued them for 20 months had been solved.
Dwayne Curd, who had died from a heroin overdose 10 months after his fiancee's slaying, was officially the killer.
During the meeting at Borders, one of the cold-case detectives "told us [the palm print] was the clincher, because it was his and was so fresh," said Sandy Selberis, who added that the detective told them forensic technology enabled them to determine the palm print had been left "eight or nine" hours before Lia's body was found.
.....
As soon as the column ran, I'm told, phones started ringing in the detective division. Those who had analyzed and investigated the palm print called to complain because they knew it wasn't Curd's.
Some unknown person had left the print.
That fact had been widely known among investigators for months.
Besides, there is no technology for dating palm prints or fingerprints with that kind of precision. The person who had left the print could've easily done it a week earlier, when Lia hosted a Halloween party.
So, three days after the column ran, the cold-case detective who had shared the palm-print evidence with Bill and Sandy Selberis was ordered to set the record straight.
The detective "called out of the blue," Selberis said. "I can't tell you how shocked I was. You can't just make up facts, just to clear a case. Creating stories, fabricating things, just to get a good statistic? Are they doing this in other cases?"
.....
Meanwhile, the city's body count continues to mount, with 62 slayings so far this year.
Since the first of last year, roughly 90 homicides have gone unsolved. Conceivably, there could be that many killers roaming around Richmond.
For all we know, the person who killed Lia Selberis is one of them.
