The Crime: Homicide
The Victim: Jimmy Conway
Location: Home of his friend, Southwestern United States
Original Theory: Shot in self-defense
People often wonder whether profilers go to the actual crime scene or if they don’t always bother and, in truth, I always go if I can. I can learn a lot by being there, standing on the spot where the victim and perpetrator once stood, absorbing the environment.
For example, you might think that some guy could toss a fellow off a particular bridge because the pictures you are looking at make that seem plausible. This happened to me on a case in Minneapolis. One of the theories was that the victim, who had been drinking at a local bar on Halloween night and been thrown out for being too inebriated, was walking over that bridge when he ran into another young man his age who tried to rob him. When he resisted, the guy pushed him over the railing. Well, that could make sense, except when I actually stood on the Hennepin Bridge at the point where it crossed the Mississippi River, I wondered how this shorter, smaller, less muscled attacker could have accomplished this. The railing was so high that the robber would have had to pick him up off the ground and heave him over it. If I hadn’t gone to the scene, I might have erroneously believed that action was possible. When you go to the location, you can see the neighborhood. You can see possible escape routes. You can analyze why someone would go that way and not this way.
Of course, sometimes crime scenes change, developers plow through them with a bulldozer, and then it’s gone, it doesn’t look anything like it did before, and then I do have to rely on the pictures.
But I learn a lot in person. I can interview people, and I can do a lot more because I can get the feel for everything. It’s not always economically reasonable to do so, in which case I have to rely on the photos and reports and hope that they will be good enough to do the case justice.
Working pro bono, as I always do (unless I am working for a defense attorney-and they don’t like me that much so it is a rare event), the family is not paying for my expenses or anything else.
In this case, the Conway family said, “We think that Jimmy was murdered. We don’t think it was self-defense, we think his friend shot him in cold blood.” They wanted me to look over the case and sent me the files, which they had because the case was closed. (If the case remains open, the family usually gets nothing.) I had access to all the photos of the crime scene and all the details in the police reports, so I could review the case quite thoroughly, even from a distance.
THE CONWAY FAMILY provided me with a solid amount of information, although the photos from the scene were lousy.
But one of the lousiest held the key.
It was one of those off-the-cuff pictures that people take. The police arrived, took a quick picture of the dead man at the scene, and it turned out to be the most valuable piece of evidence in the case file. It was a Polaroid photo that contained a blood spatter evidence pattern that convinced me that Jimmy’s “friend,” Earl White, was lying.
THIS VALUABLE OPPORTUNITY early in my career taught me the importance of photography.
When a murder is fresh, the police sometimes make snap decisions at the scene as to what they think the case is about.
In another Minnesota case, in 1998, a young man was found hanging in his bedroom. Gregg Meissner’s death was ruled a suicide at the scene and the police took no fingerprints off objects in the room. They didn’t even seal off the scene because, as they told Gregg’s mother, “This isn’t television.” The detective on the case actually allowed Gregg’s distraught friends to enter the crime scene.
The family didn’t think it was suicide, I didn’t think it was suicide, but the tests were never run. The family fought like tigers to prove Gregg was murdered, and finally, a man named Shawn Padden, one of the friends allowed into the crime scene, was convicted of killing him. However, the lack of certain evidence allowed only a manslaughter charge and not Murder One. Gregg’s family was convinced the crime was premeditated, but because the evidence wasn’t protected, the state could only prove manslaughter, and Padden might get out to kill again.
I often find this is also true for alibis, that if you make an assumption somebody is not involved and you don’t ask for an alibi, you can’t go back four years later and say, “Oh, by the way, where were you on May third?” If you’re innocent, you can’t protect yourself, because there is no way in heck you or anyone else can remember where you were on May 3. An innocent person can’t provide himself a decent alibi. A guilty person, well, he’s got an excuse not to provide himself a decent alibi, because he will say, “How the heck would I know where I was four years ago on that day?” or “How do you expect anybody to remember where I was?”
The innocent person can’t defend himself, and the guilty person can laugh and say he’s got an excuse not to remember and not have an alibi.
Like getting alibis, photography is sometimes not methodically and carefully done. If the detective thinks he knows what happened on the scene, he may not be concerned about what those detectives will have to do two, four, or ten years from now.
The detective is at the scene, seeing everything and talking to everybody. If he thinks he has solved the case, he doesn’t feel compelled to pursue any more information. But then something goes wrong. The case doesn’t get prosecuted, or it is closed as an accident or suicide, but later on, if somebody questions the veracity of that conclusion and a new sheriff reopens the investigation, where is the evidence? Now a profiler is brought in and I am looking at a report file so thin I know no interviewing was done and few tests were run. I may have an autopsy on one page that doesn’t actually say more than that the victim is dead (known as a “tailgate autopsy” because all the coroner does is drive up in his truck, drop the tailgate, put one foot up on it, light his cigar, and say, “Yep, she’s a dead one”).
If the photos are so limited that I can’t see if anything is odd in the next room of the house or if there was blood dripping off the porch or not, I will not be able to analyze the case accurately.
I’ve actually had a good laugh at some cases. Sometimes they bring me seventy boxes of notes, and I think, “Good job, guys, you’ve got typewritten interviews.” In others, I am handed a small box with a few sheets of paper and a napkin from the local eatery, on which are scribbled some unreadable words. “Oh goody, I’ve got diner notes!”
In talking with police detectives today, I tell them what I know is true of case notes: just because you think you know what your note means now, believe me, in four years, you won’t have a clue what you once meant, and neither will the next detective reading your notes. If a cold case squad or a profiler comes on board ten years from now, they won’t have notes that clearly state what happened and explain whatever you were thinking-and if you don’t have quality crime scene photographs, they will have nothing useful with which to work.
BACK TO JIMMY Conway.
If it weren’t for that one picture in the Conway case file, I might not have come to the conclusion I did.
I received police reports, the autopsy report, autopsy photos, and the crime scene photos from the family. The crime scene photos were of poor quality and did not clearly show the scene, nor were proper close-ups taken. Autopsy photos were limited and no photos of the full body of Jimmy Conway were included. Only two photos of Earl White exist that were taken that same day. No photos of Earl’s girlfriend, Heidi Mills, were taken at any time in spite of the fact that she claimed to have been severely assaulted by the deceased. There was limited processing of the scene, no gunshot residue tests were done, and no fingerprints were processed on the baseball bat or shotgun, the weapons used in the crime. The dimensions of the crime scene were never drawn.
Interviews were limited to one-time statements by Earl, Heidi, and Earl’s son, Joey. No statements were taken from Earl’s brother, whose house Earl went to right after the shooting. None of the neighbors were ever contacted either. No further interrogation was done and there was no polygraph testing.
There is a question as to when the actual homicide occurred, though it was between eight thirty and nine thirty p.m. There was not a big problem with this vague time frame, as those involved may not have paid attention to the exact time.
All agreed Jimmy arrived before Earl’s teenage son, Joey, and entered through the back door in the kitchen. Earl and Jimmy talked in the kitchen. Joey entered the house and went past Earl and Jimmy and got his clothes from his bedroom. Then he went to see Heidi in the bedroom she shared with Earl and asked her to care for his animals, as he was going away. Earl was not in their bedroom during this time because he had no knowledge of Joey asking Heidi to do this. Jimmy and Earl apparently remained in the kitchen the entire time Joey was in the house.
The investigators made one of those critical mistakes where they take a picture of something-a bloody footprint on the floor-but the crime scene investigators didn’t document where the footprint was. Which room was it in? Which way was it going? Was it headed east, west, north, south? I had no clue.
I took all of the photos in this case and looked at the bottom of each, trying to identify in some cases where the pattern was on the floor and what the green object might be in the corner. Was it the corner of a refrigerator? I took it like a jigsaw puzzle and rebuilt the house so I could determine where those bloody footprints were.
I did this by reconnecting the photos, discerning the floor patterns, and identifying the bottoms of the furniture. Once I accomplished that, I approximated where the footprints would have been and which direction the owner of the bloody feet was heading. This helped me put together part of the scenario of what happened.
But there was one more photo, an otherwise crappy Polaroid picture. I have to say CRAPPY in big capital letters. It was crappy. It was blurry. It was junk, but somebody took it and tossed it in the file. My first impression was “Boy, what a shabby picture.” But later on I returned to it and realized it was key to the entire crime. The photo said to me that these people who claimed innocence were lying. One picture made the difference.
When detectives work their cases, I urge them to take the best pictures they can, take way too many pictures, shoot a video of the scene, take close-ups of everything, draw diagrams, document as much as possible, collect all their interviews, record all the alibis, write all their notes and explanations legibly, because they never know when one piece of stray information will make all the difference. They might not catch it, and their partner might not catch it, but somebody might eventually notice. It could be the secretary in the department who one day picks up that photo and goes, “Hey, guys, look at this…” Because they had that picture, a person was able to identify something crucial.
JIMMY CONWAY WAS forty years old.
His paycheck was usually $4,000. But one payday, somebody at the company inadvertently added a zero to Jimmy’s check, giving him $40,000, and he was like, “Cool, I’ve got a $40,000 check here!”
You and I know that what he should have done was go to the company and say, “You made a mistake.”
I made that same mistake myself. Every week I paid the woman who cleans my house $40 via an electronic payment. But one time I left the decimal out. I put $4,000 in for $40. I hit the button, and the woman received $4,000 for her services. The woman’s husband called me up and said, “We think you made an error.” I thought, Oh, my God, I’ve hired an honest person. I was both relieved (really, really relieved) and impressed that this person was so honest.
As for Jimmy? Not so much.
When his employer added the zero onto his check and his $4,000 turned into $40,000, he said, “It’s my lucky day!” He intended to keep that extra $36,000.
Jimmy didn’t have a bank account, according to his sister, because he didn’t have a valid driver’s license. He told a lawyer friend what happened and said, “What should I do about this? Do I have to return it, or is it mine?”
The lawyer said that he could put it in the bank and if it stayed there for a month and he hadn’t heard from the company, then it was his. I guess Jimmy didn’t have too many ethical friends.
In addition to not having a bank account, Jimmy had a few other problems, which is why he didn’t hold a valid driver’s license. He went to his buddy Earl White, who he’d known for years, and who was related to the Conway family by marriage, for help. Earl opened a bank account and Jimmy signed the check over to Earl, who deposited it.
Before the thirty days passed, Jimmy heard back from the company:
“We want our money back.”
Jimmy went over to Earl’s house on February 4, 1999, and he said, “I need my money back. I have to return it.”
And that’s where the story gets interesting. According to Jimmy’s family, Earl told him, “That’s a problem, Jimmy, I spent more than half of it.”
Earl used $20,000 of the money Jimmy received by accident to fix up his home. When Jimmy heard this and realized he was in deep shit, he and Earl got into an angry fight.
When Jimmy showed up at Earl’s house, Joey was heading out, leaving Jimmy there with Earl and his live-in girlfriend.
A shot rang out. Joey later told Jimmy’s sister, “Your brother must have been dead by the time [I] reached the stop sign.”
Did Joey hear a shot after he left the house?
THE POLICE WERE called to investigate the incident.
They did not shoot a video, which would have been valuable because it would have shown from many angles what the place looked like. Video evidence gives the viewer a spatial feeling for the house-how long the hallway is, where things are positioned in the room-and it relieves the investigator from going click, click, click on a thousand little pictures. The video will capture all kinds of objects and things that might later be important to an investigator. Video is becoming much more routine these days, but some departments still don’t use it in every homicide investigation.
Actually, along with the video, the investigator should click, click, click as many photos as does the crime scene justice.
Video and photos taken care of, the next item needed is a diagram of the room where everything should be mapped out with proper measurements to scale so the detective knows later where the evidence was relative to the body. This was not done. Somebody took a set of crappy pictures with a camera, and there weren’t even many of those.
Based on those pictures, I had no idea where anything was and had to guess which rooms were which.
And then there was one snap with a Polaroid.
Some people wonder why Polaroids are even used anymore. In the old days, before we had electronic cameras, we printed everything out. The Polaroid was used just in case something went wrong with the standard camera and the investigator ended up with no pictures whatsoever.
Nowadays, with digital cameras, we can see right away that things are going well, and we can download them immediately to a computer for distribution and storage. The digital advantage is that we can take huge amounts of pictures, so I tell the police, “Snap away. You won’t have to print those suckers out and it won’t cost you a lot of money, because you will put them on a CD. You may not even necessarily need to waste your time looking at all of those pictures, but at least they’re there just in case.”
Of course, amateur shutterbugs can still take useless, blurry close-ups.
The police interviewed Earl and his girlfriend, asked them what happened, and that was that. Earl said it was self-defense. He said that Jimmy was enraged and planned to shoot him. Jimmy attacked, pummeling Earl and his girlfriend. They feared for their lives, so Earl pulled his sawed-off shotgun out from under the bed and shot Jimmy to end the rampage.
That was his story.
The detective said, “Sounds plausible to me.” And that was it. Case closed.
Why did they accept the story so easily? Was it because Earl’s family was well known in town, and the police didn’t want to challenge them? Was it because Jimmy was considered a crook? Admittedly, it’s hard to care about certain people, so maybe they didn’t want to waste their time.
If Earl did shoot him, and it wasn’t self-defense, who cares? Let’s just close it down.
Maybe they were inexperienced cops. But they didn’t do an investigation of any reasonable sort. They took statements from Earl, his girlfriend, and his son. They did the bare basics but no follow-up or analysis. If they had, they would surely have recognized the multiple inconsistencies in their witness statements.
The first inconsistency that struck me was the claim that Jimmy was beating the couple and that he smashed Earl’s girlfriend into a window. Earl stated that Jimmy attacked him and Heidi in the bedroom, and he described a violent assault.
“Jimmy was hitting Heidi,” he told the police. “I could hear her screaming… I heard glass breaking. I saw Jimmy push Heidi into the bedroom window.”
But there was no evidence of a broken window. And there wasn’t a single picture of the supposedly brutalized Heidi. Despite the “beating” she says she sustained, Heidi did not go to the hospital. Unless the police were incredibly sloppy, she probably did not seem injured.
Then I looked for photos of Earl’s bodily injuries. How damaged was Earl?
There were two pictures of him. One was a front-facing photo. Earl had his shirt up so you could view his upper body for any damage. I could see none on his chest. There was a slight scrape on the bridge of his nose and a slightly dark spot under his eye. That’s it.
Earl also signed a release declining to go to the hospital.
Jimmy, by the way, was a big guy, six feet tall, 220 pounds, and probably drunk.
Earl, by contrast, was a little guy, about five foot five, 130 pounds. And this disparity of force is where he could have had a credible defense. Earl could have said, “We were scared to death of this big guy who was attacking us, and I had to save my girlfriend’s life. I had to protect her.” His excuse for shooting Jimmy was good, but where was the proof that Jimmy did anything to them? There was no sign of a fight or even a struggle. All we saw was Jimmy dead on the floor with a shotgun wound to his chest.
Before Jimmy was shot, Earl’s son, Joey, was there. Joey saw Earl and Jimmy chatting in the kitchen before he left. Joey went past them in the kitchen, went to his bedroom, picked up a change of clothes, and talked to Heidi in her bedroom, the bedroom that Heidi and Earl later said they were attacked in. He asked if she could take care of his animals, because he was going away for a while.
In recounting what happened, Earl said that while Joey was still in the house, Jimmy went into Heidi’s bedroom and started yelling at her.
But Joey didn’t say a word about it in his statement.
Earl and Heidi claimed that there was an escalation between the men in their argument. Then their story became confusing. Earl said that Jimmy charged back into the bedroom after some papers, but Heidi said she brought those papers to Jimmy in the kitchen, so they already weren’t making sense, because I believe they weren’t telling the truth.
THIS IS WHAT I think happened:
I don’t think Heidi was ever in the room. Heidi stated that she went to the bathroom when Jimmy supposedly started punching Earl. She said that when she came out of the bathroom and entered the bedroom, the altercation was already going on. But Earl said Jimmy attacked him and Heidi in the bedroom. He indicated Heidi was already in the bedroom when the physical violence began. I believe Heidi was never in the bedroom, which is why she seemed to have no bruises on her.
Earl decided Heidi had to be in the bedroom, too, so he had somebody to protect. Earl probably pressured Heidi to support his story, so she reported, “Yep, I was in the bedroom, too, and he attacked me, too.”
That made her a witness and a victim as well, giving Earl cover for committing this act of murder.
I believe Heidi was probably in the kitchen when Earl shot Jimmy. I think he coached her to say what she said. They both claim Jimmy said these exact words: “You think you are going to shoot me, motherfucker? I have a gun in my car!”
This was kind of weird, because if Jimmy says, “You think you are going to shoot me, motherfucker?” you would think he was being threatened with a gun at the time. And if he was being threatened with a gun at the time, it’s kind of a strange thing to say. “I’ve got a gun in my car.” It’s not going to do you a lot of good if your gun is not in your hand. How can you threaten a person with a gun that’s not even around? It’s a stupid statement.
It didn’t make sense, but I do think it’s possible that such a statement was made in the kitchen. If Earl threatened Jimmy and said, “I could shoot you, buddy,” and Jimmy said, “You think you are going to shoot me, motherfucker? I have a gun in my car! Yeah, you get your gun in the bedroom, I’ll get mine in my car!” But they probably were just saying stuff, and I don’t think Jimmy believed Earl was serious.
I think Earl went to his bedroom, and I think Jimmy followed him in to talk to him.
Here’s where it gets fascinating:
After Jimmy was shot in the chest, both Heidi and Earl said he fell onto the bedroom couch. This was true; I could see blood all over the couch, so the police photographs confirmed that, yes, that did happen.
Then Heidi stated that after Jimmy clutched his chest and fell facedown on the couch, she beat him with a baseball bat. Yes, she felt it necessary to hit a defenseless, dying man in the head with a baseball bat that she conveniently found in the corner, where she was trapped. According to her account, she was in the corner of the bedroom, saw Jimmy get shot in the chest and as he fell to the sofa, she thought, That’s not enough, let me hit him in the head with a baseball bat, because I’m scared of him.
I don’t know about you, but if I just saw somebody get blown away with a shotgun, I’m not worried that they will be coming after me at that point.
Except… I believe Heidi is trying to make some point about this baseball bat. There is a reason for that, and I’m coming to it.
Heidi claimed not to remember how many times she hit Jimmy. In one report, she supposedly told somebody twenty to thirty times-but Jimmy didn’t even have the slightest concussion! No damage to his head at all!
She also said that after she hit Jimmy on the head, he got off the sofa and fell to the floor, then never moved again.
Jimmy was found on the floor next to the sofa. He was dead right there, that’s for sure. But what she said was curious: “He never moved again.”
Earl said that Jimmy fell on the couch and then straight to the floor. He also said that Heidi hit Jimmy with a baseball bat after he got to the floor, so their stories didn’t quite agree.
At that point, they both checked on Jimmy and then they left the house. That was their claim.
I say that Heidi was never in the bedroom at all. It is my belief that Heidi never touched the baseball bat, never struck Jimmy, and was merely repeating a story given to her by Earl to account for his use of the baseball bat on Jimmy.
Here’s where the photos made such a difference to the plausibility of their stories. There was only one set of bloody footprints leading from the bedroom into the kitchen. One. Of course, the police never said to whom those bloody footprints belonged. They should have been able to look at their feet and make an easy match, but that was never in the notes. There was one foot that stepped into the blood but, I wondered, if there were two people running around going crazy, beating people with baseball bats and checking on the dead guy on the floor, then why were there not two sets of footprints leaving? It seemed obvious to me that Heidi was never, ever, there.
Earl said that when Jimmy fell to the floor and was dead, he and Heidi left the premises. No mention was ever made of coming back to check on the dead man.
Heidi, however, maintained that she and Earl came back with a handgun and went to the bedroom and saw that Jimmy hadn’t moved at all. She said they went back to check after they got a handgun. The guy was shot in the chest and beaten twenty times with a baseball bat, but Heidi thought they needed another gun to make certain he was 110 percent dead.
Earl, on the other hand, didn’t mention returning with another gun.
Was Jimmy really dead when they claimed he was?
However, one photo showed that there was blood from Jimmy’s body all the way from his right side to the entrance of the room.
This was blood that spread out from under his body after he was shot; but it was not just a solid, expanding pool of blood. Something had come in contact with that blood. The photo showed smeared blood, and a dead man doesn’t smear blood. If he had lain there and hadn’t moved, there would be no smearing.
The picture of the blood going to the right side of the room was one of the regular pictures. But it was the Polaroid that linked it all together. In the spread blood, you could see two interesting things. There were four lines parallel to each other through the blood, and then there was kind of a muck mark, a spot where a palm pressed on the floor. I looked at that and thought, Hmmm. I looked at his fingers, and there was blood on them. It looked like somebody’s hand dragged through that blood, like a person trying to push himself up, trying to get off the floor. Was that indeed what I was looking at?
A little bit further down in that blood there was something else interesting. There was a crescent, a bloody area with a little crescent moon shape missing out of it. I wondered, Where did that go? It was lifted out of there somehow. Why was that spot of blood missing?
Something had been in that blood and then was pulled off it. I looked at that. The extra Polaroid picture showed Jimmy lying on his stomach on the floor. There were other pictures, better pictures showing Jimmy on the floor, but this was the only picture that showed his shoe. This picture showed the bottom of Jimmy’s right shoe, and it showed Jimmy’s heel. At first glance, one would think there was no blood on his shoe. And there shouldn’t be, because, after all, the guy fell and was lying on his stomach, so the blood would not be on the soles of the shoes. But then I looked closer and I saw it, blood; blood on the bottom of Jimmy’s heel. There was a small crescent of blood, a curved area of blood on his heel that matched exactly the missing part in the pattern on the floor.
This evidence contradicted the accounts of Earl and Heidi.
I believe that Jimmy was not dead on the floor. He lay on the floor, alive, and tried to get up. He dragged his hand through the blood, put his palm down, got his knee up underneath him, and stepped in the blood. There was some blood spatter on the door. I think he picked up his hand and cast off the blood onto the door, and that’s as far as he got when somebody or something made him step back, fall down, and never move again.
That somebody was probably the returning Earl, who came back with the baseball bat, pushed Jimmy with it, and knocked him down.
But when Earl and Heidi both said, “He never moved again,” that was probably a lie, because I believe the photo shows that Jimmy moved.
Continuing with my hypothesis, I believe the two of them left the room thinking he was dead, and then they heard Jimmy moving around. Oh crap, Jimmy’s alive and he’s getting up!
One of them went for the gun and one went for a baseball bat. And they both thought, That guy better be dead. But he wasn’t dead. He was dying. I don’t think they had to do more than push him, and then he collapsed and never moved again.
As for the bat? If you hit somebody with a bat twenty to thirty times, wouldn’t you have blood spattered all over that bat? But there wasn’t any blood on the bat except for where it looked like someone laid the bat in some blood and rolled it around.
It’s also possible that Earl asked Heidi to hit him-Earl-in the nose with the baseball bat just enough to look like Jimmy caused some damage to support their assertion that Earl was assaulted. Maybe Earl did it to himself.
It reminds me of the husband who said, “The robbers came into the house and they shot my wife six times in the face, and they shot me in the shoulder. It was painful.” In other words, they killed the wife, but they left the husband alive and only gave him a flesh wound in the shoulder.
Really?
Did Earl bop himself in the face with that baseball bat just enough to cause some damage and pretend he was attacked? I guess he couldn’t bring himself to hit his girlfriend in the face with a baseball bat and damage her.
What I saw clearly from the photos in this case was that this was no case of self-defense. Most likely, Jimmy was shot while sitting on the couch complaining. It was a downward shot to Jimmy’s chest, so it looked like Earl reached under the bed, pulled out the gun, and shot down at Jimmy, who then fell to the floor.
After he was dead, I believe Earl and Heidi concocted the story about how they were both assaulted. But their statements and the pictures did not match. Their statements were inconsistent. They didn’t match each other’s. They didn’t make sense. They didn’t match the elements of the scene. There was little evidence of self-defense.
This was a homicide; the police should have investigated the crime scene for at least second-degree murder. It didn’t seem like it was premeditated because the fight erupted after Jimmy confronted Earl. But it is important to remember that premeditation can be a plan you work out just a minute or two before the murder, something like, “Son-of-a-bitch, I am going to have to repay Jimmy! Or I can kill him.” Then it would be murder in the first degree.
I SENT MY profile to the Conway family in 2005.
The manner of death in this case should not have been classified as a justifiable homicide, and the case should be reopened and properly investigated. There was no evidence here that anyone in the house was in danger of death or extreme bodily harm by Jimmy Conway.
Earl White had a clear motive to kill Jimmy Conway. He had been involved with Jimmy in an effort to bilk Jimmy’s employer of a considerable sum of money and had spent a good portion of what he was supposed to be holding for Jimmy. Jimmy wanted the money back so he could turn it over to the company but the money no longer existed.
Clearly, there was reason for bad feelings on the part of both Jimmy and Earl. Certainly Jimmy could have threatened Earl that night but we have no evidence that he did other than the cockeyed word of the shooter and his girlfriend. Based on this information only, the stories of these two should be carefully checked and analyzed against the evidence and not taken as the unvarnished truth.
The family of Jimmy Conway deserved more than a cursory glance at the events of that night. A full investigation into the murder of Jimmy Conway should be undertaken by whatever law enforcement agency is willing and equipped to do the job.