Blogger turns a police investigation

The power of the blogger?

Rick Outzen was determined that the official version of the killing of Byrd and Melanie Billings, the parents of 13 adopted children with special needs, who were murdered in their nine-bedroom house just a few miles from here because they were rich was simply not the case.

Rick had heard that it may have been relating to a contract killing due to Byrd Billing's former ownership of a strip club and set out to prove that was indeed the case using a blog post to put forward his theory.

The New York Times reports that

six weeks after the killings, Mr. Outzen has not had to retract anything he has written. The Escambia County sheriff, David Morgan, said in an interview that Mr. Outzen had helped the investigation and that his anonymous sources were largely right: about a safe the killers appear to have overlooked inside the Billings home, with $164,000 in cash; about Mr. Billings’s dubious reputation; and about Leonard Gonzalez Jr., whom the police have identified as the intruders’ ringleader, and whom Mr. Outzen identified as a self-defense instructor, who once worked for Mr. Tice.