By RANDY ROSS
Longview News Journal
Friday, September 19, 2008

BRYAN — The evidence log in the Kentucky Fried Chicken homicide investigation is missing, and no one knows what happened to it, according to the man who was lead investigator in the 1983 case.

Danny Pirtle, a former Kilgore police detective who is running unopposed for Rusk County sheriff, testified Thursday morning in Hartsfield's capital murder trial. Darnell Hartsfield, 47, is charged in the shooting deaths of five people who were kidnapped in 1983 from a Kilgore Kentucky Fried Chicken.

He said the Kentucky Fried Chicken evidence was entered into a separate log from the rest of the Kilgore Police Department's investigations at that time. A former Kilgore police captain was in charge of that log, he said. Attempts to locate the evidence log have not been successful, he said.

Pirtle said the Kilgore Police Department did not assign a lead investigator in the case until three weeks after the crime occurred. The delay in appointing a lead investigator was, in retrospect, a "bad move," he said.

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