In the hours after his wife was shot to death on Jan. 16, 2015, Steven Lindsey appeared visually upset, as a police video shows him sitting with his head down on a table and crying, “No, no, no, no,” repeatedly.
The video, which prosecutors played for a jury during the second day of Lindsey’s murder trial, shows him waiting for an officer to come speak with him, sitting in a small room at a table large enough for just a few people where he sometimes hits his head on the table and sometimes rocks back and forth with his arm crossed over his stomach. Although much of what he says is inaudible, Lindsey, wearing a red T-shirt, can be heard saying, “I can’t breathe,” and, “You’ve got to be strong.”
Porter County Detective Lt. Tim Manteuffel told the jury that although Lindsey appeared upset throughout his 13-hour stay at the Porter County Sheriff’s Department that day, he never actually saw any tears on Lindsey’s face or him reach for a tissue. Add in inconsistencies with Lindsey’s story, Manteuffel testified, and he began viewing Lindsey as a person of interest in the case within a few hours.
“Stuff wasn’t adding up,” Manteuffel testified.
In the video, Lindsey, 36, tells Manteuffel that he had spent the day before lounging around his house in Center Township reading. His wife, Melinda Lindsey, then 23, made dinner before they put their daughter to bed around 8 p.m., he said, and then they watched a movie on their couch. She went to bed a little later, and he said he went in to cuddle with her for about 30 minutes before returning to the living room couch because the light was bothering him, Manteuffel testified.
He estimated falling asleep on the couch around 2 a.m. and then was awakened sometime later.
“I woke up in a stranglehold or something from behind,” he said in the video.
He then blacked out, Lindsey told Manteuffel, and woke up when he heard a gunshot. At this point, Lindsey said, he was in his daughter’s bedroom with his hands tied behind his back. Despite this, he was able to angle his arms to the side to reach his cellphone in his pants pockets and call 911 to tell them someone had his wife.
His wife was shot in the head while lying in their bed and died later at Methodist Hospitals Northlake in Gary.
Manteuffel noted that several of these details appeared odd. For instance, he said, Lindsey’s neck appeared fine and had no marks or abrasions on it, something he would expect to see on someone who had been in a chokehold. Lindsey also reported in the interview that he had a bump on his head, after Manteuffel asked him if someone knocked him out, but in pictures of Lindsey’s head shown to the jury, there’s no discoloration or visible bump.
Other officers also reported that there were no signs of a disturbance in the living room and that nothing appeared knocked out of place.
Manteuffel also questioned how Lindsey knew his wife had been shot when he claimed to have never left his daughter’s bedroom once he woke up. The officer noted that Lindsey reported his wife had started keeping her gun on the nightstand next to her because of concerns about a stalker and that it was possible she had shot the intruder.
The officer also told the jury that although Lindsey did ask several times how his wife was doing, he never asked about details, such as where she was shot, and asked to see his brother more than he asked after his wife.
At one point during his talk with Lindsey, a test swab from Lindsey’s hands came back with a preliminary positive result for gunpowder residue. The sample was later shown to be a false positive, and Larry Rogers, defense attorney for Lindsey, has argued that police decided at that point that Lindsey was the killer and never seriously investigated other potential suspects.
“Was that the be-all, end-all for you as an investigator?” Deputy Prosecutor Cheryl Polarek asked him.
“No,” Manteuffel said, adding that they would have arrested Lindsey at that point instead of letting him go home that night.
Testimony in the trial, which began Wednesday and is expected to last about a month, is set to resume Friday afternoon.
