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Provo • It's not something that the Utah medical examiner had ever done before in his career: Change the manner of a death from undetermined to homicide and then back to undetermined.
But that was the case in the autopsy report for 25-year-old Heidy Truman, Edward Leis testified on Tuesday in 4th District Court.
The deputy chief medical examiner said the woman's cause of death has never changed. She died from a "contact gunshot wound" to the head, Leis testified, meaning someone pressed the muzzle of a gun against her head and fired the weapon.
Prosecutors accuse the woman's husband, now-35-year-old Conrad Mark Truman, of pulling the trigger on Sept. 30, 2012 at the couple's Orem home. He is on trial for the second time on charges of murder and obstructing justice, after a judge last year overturned his conviction because of incorrect home measurements presented to a jury in 2014.
Conrad Truman's attorneys told a new jury last week that he did not kill his wife, and that she died of a self-inflicted wound.
Leis' testimony came during the second week of the Conrad Truman's trial. Leis told the jury that he initially ruled Heidy Truman's manner of death as "undetermined."
After meeting with police and prosecutors and reviewing evidence in November 2012, Leis said he changed the manner of death to homicide. That was the finding presented to the first jury, which found Conrad Truman guilty.
But Leis testified on Tuesday that he relied on incorrect home measurements — the same measurements that the first jury considered in delivering their guilty verdict — when he made the "homicide" conclusion.
In 2015, Leis reviewed the correct measurements and other new information from Conrad Truman's defense team and visited the Truman residence. This led him to amend Heidy Truman's death certificate once more, finding again that her manner of death was "undetermined."
"Going to the scene," he said, "and being in the actual hallway and such, and then where her body was actually found — it made it much more feasible than it was previously presented that something could have happened in the hallway if she had committed the act herself."
Judge Samuel McVey wrote in a ruling last year that the police officers who initially measured the Truman home recorded inches as feet, so a measurement of 139 inches became 13.9 feet — instead of just over 11.5 feet.
Where Heidy Truman was inside their home when she was shot, and how far she could have traveled after she was wounded before collapsing near a stairwell, were contentious points during the first trial.
The incorrect measurements, defense attorneys Mark Moffat and Ann Marie Taliaferro have argued, could have led jurors to discredit Conrad Truman's testimony that his wife was shot in the hallway, because they would have shown that his wife had to travel down a hallway that was 2 feet longer than it actually was before falling. During the first trial, Leis testified that the woman could have traveled only about a foot or a foot-and-a-half after suffering a gunshot wound in the head.
Conrad Truman's trial is expected to continue through this month.