The Hal and Connie Bynum Murder/Suicide - or was it? Part 4

WARNING - some of this is extremely graphic and bloody. Not for the feint of heart. 

If the timeline from the official records are accurate the investigators were working on a schedule that would make the writers and actors of CSI proud. Bynum called the sheriff’s office dispatcher at 4:50 a.m. on Saturday morning, May 28, 1994 to report finding his wife Connie dead in their yard at the Junction airport. The autopsy was performed at the Bexar County Forensic Science Center in San Antonio at 11:00 a.m. the same morning – about seven hours later. 

Jan C. Garavaglia, the medical examiner who did he autopsy, noted “the body is that of a well developed, well nourished white female, measuring 63 ½ inches in length, weighing 137 pounds and whose appearance is consistent with the given age of 43 years.” There were apparent ligature marks on her wrists and bruises on her legs from her ankles to her groin and a bite mark on one breast. The cause of death was two penetrating horizontally oriented stab wounds to the dome (upper region) of the vaginal vault, one extending through the pelvic wall into the abdominal cavity for approximately three inches. In plain English, Connie Bynum probably suffered the indignity of being tied up naked and being stabbed in the vagina. 

When the Rangers told Garavaglia that the sheriff claimed his wife died of a heart attack, she said “sticking a knife up her vagina and she has a heart attack to me that still is a homicide.” 

As previously discussed in an earlier installment of this horrifying story, the three Rangers investigating the case interviewed Hal Bynum later that day – staring at about 8:30 p.m. – and told him they thought he killed her. When they asked him how she got the internal stab wounds he bizarrely claimed she was probably having sex with the Rottweiler and he did it. They told him they were going to have the examiner inspect the body again the next morning and let him go. 

The following morning, Sunday May 29, Ranger Buckalew went to the M.E.’s office in San Antonio for part two of the autopsy. They saw more signs of trauma, including marks at the base of the neck, more bruising on the legs, and the bite mark on the breast was more visible. The M.E. thought the bruises on the legs were consistent with rape. Buckalew called Ranger Cummings, who informed him that Sheriff Bynum had contacted the Kimble County Shieriff’s Office at approximately 9:00 a.m. and requested that Deputies Chapman and John Cary meet him at a remote airstrip on Strube Place Ranch about 17 miles out of town. 

When the deputies arrived they found Sheriff Bynum’s dead with a self inflicted shotgun wound to the chest. Bynum was lying on his back. A department issued twelve gauge pump shotgun was laying on his chest/stomach area. The end of the barrel was still inside a circular hole in the shirt in the mid-chest, slightly offset to the left. A green, expended shotshell was half ejected from the barrel, but still fully in the loading chamber. The expended shotshell appears to be triple 0 buck. 

Maybe someone with more knowledge of firearms than I have can explain how a shotgun shell was half ejected from a pump shotgun if its operator was dead.

Coming up – the suicide notes, and more questions about Hal and Connie Bynum’s past.