The justice system often resolves the unanswered questions when someone is charged with a crime. And some cases start out murky and just get murkier.
Consider former Philadelphia cop David Wade Howard, a man with a colorful past who was charged on March 26 with witness intimidation and terroristic threats in connection with the slaying of William Blount on Easter morning in 2014.
Now, Blount's girlfriend, 38-year-old Alisa Davis, had already been charged with murder for shooting Blount, 49, whose body was found at 8:07 a.m., April 20, 2014, in his bullet-riddled 2000 Plymouth Voyager outside Davis' home on 18th Street in the city's Tioga section.
But police documents filed in the case against Howard suggested his involvement might be much deeper.
According to the documents, on March 11, homicide detectives got a tip from an unidentified person who said Howard had called and said: "I shot Bop [Blount] through the windshield. If you say anything, I will kill you."
Authorities set $900,000 bail for Howard and since then he's been in the city's Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility.
But on Wednesday – the date of Howard's preliminary hearing in Philadelphia Municipal Court – Assistant District Attorney Gail Fairman announced she was withdrawing the charges.
According to Fairman, the unidentified person who called police and incriminated Howard was Davis -- once Howard's girlfriend -- and that ended up causing an insurmountable problem for the case against him. How could Davis testify against Howard without violating her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination?
Fairman said the charges were withdrawn but could be refiled if circumstances change.
Davis waived her preliminary hearing on the murder charge on May 19, a move which sometimes signals the possibility of a negotiated guilty plea. Davis' next pretrial hearing is July 2.
"I think they [the prosecution] understand that we have a weird, strange situation," said Howard's attorney, Gary S. Silver. "What really happened, they don't know."
In addition to the Fifth Amendment issue, Silver said he doesn't know of any corroboration for Davis' claim that Howard called her, told her he killed Blount and then threatened her.
Howard, meanwhile, remains in prison and it could be some time before he gets out. His arrest in the Blount case violated his parole from a May 2004 incident in which he was charged with shooting and critically wounding a Williamsport, Pa., man he caught in bed with his wife in her apartment in the Lycoming County community.
Howard, then a police officer for 13 years, was found guilty of aggravated and simple assault, reckless endangerment, and terroristic threats and in April 2006 was sentenced by a Lycoming County judge to 5 1/2 to 12 years in prison.
State prison officials said Howard, now 51, was released on parole in July 2011. Three years later Howard was sent back to prison for a parole violation but was paroled again November 2014.