Witnesses pinpoint victim's pickup

In December 1990, on the weekend when David Bush is accused of killing his wife and burying her body, Rod Odenbach noticed an unfamiliar truck in the Kaycee post office parking lot.

"The only thing that drew my attention was the red license plate," he testified Tuesday, and then he spelled out why.

"B-U-S-H."

Item 241, the personalized license plate from Lynn Bush's black 1985 Ford F-150, was introduced as state's evidence last week in the first-degree murder trial of David Bush. On Tuesday afternoon, three people who lived in Kaycee at the time placed the truck in their small Wyoming town. All three remembered the truck because of its license plate.

Defense attorney Vaughn Neubauer, during opening statements last week, asked the jury to note how stories change, referring specifically to the people who would testify about seeing the truck in Kaycee that weekend, 76 miles north of Casper.

"David Bush didn't go to Kaycee," he said then.

None of those witnesses testified that they saw David Bush in the truck, but they were sure they saw the truck. The truck's presence in Kaycee would be significant, because prosecutors suggest Bush may have buried his wife's body in that area.

In other testimony on Tuesday, a federal prisoner said that David Bush confessed to the killing when they served time together.

Odenbach, a self-employed gunsmith in Kaycee at the time, told Neubauer on Tuesday that in 1990 he spent his lunch break at home with his son, and always went home at noon. On Saturday, Dec. 8, he stopped by the post office on the way home, he said.

Neubauer asked if he was sure of the day. Odenbach, now an officer with the Johnson County Sheriff's Department, said he didn't remember the date, but he was "almost 100 percent sure" the day was Saturday. He said he didn't see the driver of the truck, and just parked behind it in the parking lot.

Wally Elm, a rancher in Kaycee, remembered seeing the truck pass him on that same Saturday sometime between 10 a.m. and noon on Wyoming Highway 192, a road he said he drives just about every day.

Natrona County Assistant District Attorney Dan Itzen asked why he remembered that truck.

"I used to drink a lot of Busch beer," Elm said, eliciting laughter from jury members and those watching the trial, but not from David Bush. "I guess it stuck in my mind."

The truck passed, he said, and he didn't see where it went nor did he think much about it until Casper police came to Kaycee later that week and began asking locals if they'd seen the truck.

Another witness, Lyle Lund, said he saw it about 23 miles directly west of Kaycee on Sunday afternoon at about 3:30 or 4, which would place the truck out of town just hours before David Bush called Casper police to report that he found it in the Buttrey's Grocery Store parking lot. He told an officer Lynn Bush had gone there Saturday to buy groceries for a poker party.

"It was a (county) No. 1, 'BUSH' license plate," said Lund, also a Kaycee rancher.

Verlynn Dehii, who in 1990 delivered mail to the Bush residence on 17th and McKinley, said the truck wasn't in Casper that Saturday morning.

The truck was always parked up against the sidewalk, Dehii said, so he had to walk around it to deliver the mail. He said he didn't have to when he delivered mail at about 9 a.m. on Dec. 8.

"I'm 99 percent sure," he told Natrona County District Attorney Michael Blonigen.

Neubauer asked if that was sure enough.

"I ran this through my head 100 times," Dehii said. "I didn't have anything to sign for (that Saturday). That pickup wasn't there that day."

None of those witnesses said they saw any signs of foul play. But Cory Adkins, currently in federal prison, said David Bush talked to him about how he had killed Lynn Bush when the two men were in the Wyoming State Penitentiary in the early '90s.

Bush spent time there for aiding his brother and another prisoner after they escaped from jail in August 1990. Adkins was there at the time on grand larceny charges. Now he's serving a 200-month sentence for conspiring to distribute methamphetamine.

He appeared before the jury in prison garb, and said he used to know the Bush family through the late '70s and early '80s. When they met in the state pen, Adkins said, he talked to Bush sometime in 1993 or 1994 about some girlfriend problems he was having.

Adkins said he didn't remember exactly what Bush said, but it was something like, "You can get rid of her like I did."

He said they talked several times about Lynn Bush, and how David Bush killed her. Adkins said David Bush told him he hit her with a bottle, and then she tried to call someone, a friend or the police, and he struck her with a phone.

He said Bush said he "cut her up" and buried her either in a lime quarry or a lime depository. Adkins said Bush told him he tried to make it look like there was a struggle in the truck, and Adkins said he told Bush he thought it was "kind of crazy" to think that someone at a grocery store parking lot wouldn't notice a struggle.

"(He) got kinda p - - -ed off," Adkins said, and the two didn't talk again during their time in prison together.

Blonigen asked Adkins if he'd been promised anything for his testimony, and Adkins said he had not, but he hoped the testimony would benefit him somehow anyway.

Neubauer asked Adkins if his testimony was based on rumors, and Adkins said no. He asked Adkins if he thought the testimony could get him moved to another facility.

"That'd be great, but it ain't gonna happen," Adkins said.

The testimony followed a morning that continued to link blood found in the pickup and on a Smirnoff pint bottle to Lynn Bush.

Earlier Tuesday, Kevin Noppinger, the lab director at Florida-based DNA Laboratories International, testified in regard to tests the lab performed on 29 items sent there in 2005 by the Casper Police Department.

Those items were presented and/or discussed during the first-degree murder trial of David Bush. Many of them came from the Ford F150 that belonged to Bush's wife, Lynn Bush.

Natrona County District Attorney Michael Blonigen continued the process of trying to show the jury that something happened in the pickup that weekend. Noppinger testified that six full samples and two partial samples, identified from various swabs taken inside the truck, almost certainly belonged to a child of Larry and Gayle Knievel and the mother of Lynn's daughter Misty Bush. That made it almost certainly Lynn Bush's blood.

How certain? Noppinger said if he took the unique profile out into the general population, he would find it in one out of every 51 quadrillion people. He said that was a conservative estimate.

"That's 51 with 15 zeroes after it," Noppinger said. "We've exceeded the planet Earth."

Areas swabbed -- including the sun visor, the weather stripping, the passenger door -- have been mentioned by others who have testified about earlier testing of the blood in the truck. On Tuesday, questions were raised about a bloody glove. The glove wasn't mentioned in the affidavit for David Bush's arrest, so it's unclear how much significance it has to the trial.

A pair of work gloves were sent to DNA Laboratories for testing, Noppinger told Blonigen. Blood on the webbing between the left thumb and index finger showed a match to David Bush's DNA.

It was uncertain during testimony where the glove was obtained during the original search. DNA testing, as Noppinger said during defense questioning, cannot indicate when or how David Bush's blood ended up on the glove.