[May 15, 2013] Detective cites Abaroa's inconsistencies Tweet DURHAM, May 15, 2013 (The Herald-Sun - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- The knife Raven Abaroa unpacked in Utah wasn't his, he said. Instead, police Detective Charles Sole testified on Tuesday, Abaroa claimed that it had been left behind by cops in the Durham home where his wife, Janet Marie Christiansen Abaraoa, was murdered. Currently, Abaroa is on trial for first-degree murder. He was arrested in February 2010 while living in Idaho. Shortly after his wife's death in 2005, Abaroa took his six-month-old son and moved back to the Salt Lake City area, where his family lived, and later moved to Montpelier, Idaho. On Tuesday morning, Detective Charles Sole testified that when he was assigned to the cold case near the end of 2008, he began reviewing the files and decided to establish communication with Abaroa in the hopes of eventually getting Abaroa to confess. He talked to Abaroa on the telephone 10 to 12 times and also exchanged emails and text messages, Sole said. One thing they talked about was a knife that Abaroa mailed to his attorney, and the attorney turned the knife over to the Durham Police Department. Abaroa said that he found the knife in a box of his belongings, which had been packed up for him by a relative at his home in Durham and delivered to him in Utah. The knife had been at the crime scene, he said, and he "acted like it was a joke that the police had left the knife at the crime scene," Sole said. "The thing that concerned me, he claimed the knife was left visible in the crime scene, and that's just not true," the detective said. Sole played a video that Abaroa made of himself holding the knife and saying he was going to send it to his North Carolina attorney. The video showed a double-edged throwing knife. Sole also testified that he looked into the clothing that Abaroa said he wore the night he came home from a soccer game and found his wife dead on the floor of their upstairs office. When Abaroa talked to the first investigator on the case, he went into great detail about why he was wearing the sweatshirt, Sole said. But Sole said he noticed that Abaroa wasn't wearing the hooded sweatshirt in a security video from a convenience store where Abaroa stopped to get a Gatorade on his way home from the soccer game. "It was a big indicator to me," Sole said. "It was a big inconsistency." Later, Sole played a video that Abaroa made of himself speaking to the camera after a telephone conversation with Sole. It was difficult to hear all of the audio, but in parts of it Abaroa asks why there is a problem with him talking to authorities. Abaroa then talked about winning a $3 million lottery. He said he would spend $2 million fighting the allegations against him and would devote the third million to his home and his son. Sole testified that he was the K-9 officer who responded to the Abaroa home on the night of the murder in 2005. His dog, Bronco, searched around the perimeter of the house and did not find any fresh tracks leading to or from the house, he said. The dog did find a coin along the edge of a small creek that ran in front of the home, but the dog did not follow a track from the house to the creek when it located the coins, he said. Sole testified under direct examination that he learned Abaroa had obtained a driver's license under the name of Raven Samuel Peters in California. He also testified that when he talked to Abaroa on the telephone, he believed Abaroa was in Salt Lake City, but later learned he was in Idaho. Under cross examination, Abaroa's attorney, Amos Tyndall, asked if it was true that the name on Abaroa's birth certificate was Raven Samuel Peters, and Sole said he was aware that Abaroa's last name at birth was Peters. Tyndall also asked Sole if Abaroa told him he was living in Salt Lake City when they talked on the phone, and Soles said Abaroa had agreed to meet with him in an attorney's office in Salt Lake City. They talked about a meeting place not where he lived, Sole said. Tyndall also asked if it was true that Montpelier, Idaho was only 150 miles from Salt Lake City and was considered a resort town, and Sole said yes. Sole testified that based on the fact that Abaroa answered his phone calls, and they had talked each time for about an hour, he had no doubt that Abaroa would have met him in Salt Lake City. Court recessed early for the day Tuesday, and is scheduled to resume today at 9:30 a.m. with Sole still on the stand. ___ (c)2013 The Herald-Sun (Durham, N.C.) Visit The Herald-Sun (Durham, N.C.) at www.heraldsun.com Distributed by MCT Information Services [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]