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The next time I had a big cleaning out event, we decided the whole using the garbage truck idea was obviously out of the
question, so we settled on destruction by fire. (Again…totally permissible back in those days..) A local fire fighter was burning
an old barn on his property and he said we could put all our evidence in there. So we drove out about 40 file boxes full of all
kinds of evidence. And literally threw them into the inferno, which was already going by the time we got there. The supervising
sergeant asked me if I had found all the random rounds of ammo and although I assured him that I had, he somehow found a
full box of .22 caliber shells that we decided probably should not be burned. So then we had to hand sort everything and found
to my chagrin a couple of loaded shotgun shells. It also gave the sergeant a great opportunity to set aside a little pile of radio
scanners and trinkets and assorted other items that “he would personally see get disposed of,” he said with a wink. “Someday in
the future.”

My enthusiasm for being the property and evidence custodian was rather low; I did not really enjoy being the custodian of all
the evidence. Each case report that had evidence or found property got a three-page/triplicate form and each form required
multiple signatures. To get state accredited, which means “meeting the current best recognized standards” required getting an
alarm system for the evidence room, along with the keys for all the locks and safes. It was a lot of extra work, I got paid nothing
extra of course, and it was a ton of extra responsibility. So I started telling the sergeants that should find some other cop to
bestow this great opportunity to. Eventually I lucked out, and it was all because an old woman got killed with a golf club.

In a nearby neighboring city, the evidence custodian for their department was one of their detectives. Seemed like a good idea
at the time. Until the murder. Then the detective/evidence custodian got subpoenaed to testify in court for the trial, where the
accused murdered was being tried for clubbing to death an old woman in her apartment, using her dead husband’s old golf
clubs. She had lived in an apartment above the newspaper office, and the crime was discovered when her blood soaked through
the floor and ceiling and started dripping onto the desks of the newspapers staffers. During the trial the detective was mercilessly
questioned by the defense attorneys who tried to suggest to the jury that since he had collected the evidence at the scene and
then had access to it all in the evidence room, then he could have easily tampered with it all and so therefore all of the evidence
should be disqualified. The defense attorneys failed in that tactic and their client was convicted of the murder, but it was enough
to convince everybody that detectives and/or patrol officers should probably not also be in charge of the police evidence room.

So my duty was turned over to our support staff of clerks, which worked okay until one of them, um, got caught stealing money,
jewelry, and guns. She went to off to prison, in one of the more spectacular falls from grace I’ve personally witnessed.