Optical connections: Could glasses catch a killer this time round?

The scene: a suburban freeway near Atlanta, Georgia, in January 2000. An argument between two motorists results in one of them being shot dead, the perpetrator fleeing in his car, never to be caught. Now, 17 years later, a pair of bifocal spectacles could hold the clue to the killer’s identity, in an eerie echo of a 1924 murder case known as ‘the trial of the century’, as previously featured in Optician (How a pair of glasses caught two killers, May 8, 2015).

The early morning of Friday, January 28, 2000, was going to be the start of a big weekend for Chris Duron. He had set out at 6am to meet with a customer in Tennessee to tie up a $3 million contract for his tile business. But it was also shaping up to be a busy weekend for the city of Atlanta: American football fans and the media were converging on the town as Super Bowl XXXIV was due to take place at the city’s Georgia Dome on the Sunday; and local TV and radio stations had one eye on an ice storm approaching from Alabama. What was to happen to Duron as he drove north on Interstate-75 in his new Chevrolet Tahoe would be largely submerged in the flurry of news coverage of those other events.