Police Search Rusty's Home and Collect Evidence

The search of Rusty Sabich’s home turned an internal investigation into the collection of physical evidence against him. Conducted a day or two after the meeting Rusty and Barbara Sabich called Black Wednesday, it yielded carpet and clothing samples that later figured in the circumstantial case against Rusty, while his response to the grand jury marked the loss of what he saw as a chance to contain the damage to his reputation.

Background and Warrant

By the time the troopers arrived, Nico Delia Guardia and Tommy Molto were investigating Rusty. The visit followed the meeting in Raymond Horgan’s office; Tom Nyslenski, a longtime process server for the prosecutor’s office, delivered two grand-jury subpoenas. One required Rusty to produce a blood specimen, and the other ordered him to testify. The troopers also had a narrowly drawn search warrant authorizing them to take samples of carpeting throughout the house and every piece of Rusty’s exterior clothing.

The warrant specified those materials rather than authorizing an unrestricted search. Rusty noted that the investigators did not search for the murder weapon. He reasoned that a law-enforcement professional would not keep such an object and that searching for it could force the prosecutors to acknowledge in court that it had not been found.

Collection at the House

Rusty and Barbara remained in the living room as the three troopers moved through the house, collecting material in plastic bags. They spent about an hour in the closet, taking small swatches from the seams of Rusty’s clothes. The search made the domestic space itself part of the prosecution’s evidence-gathering: carpeting and clothing, ordinary household materials, became potential links between Rusty and Carolyn Polhemus’s murder.

Rusty contacted Sandy Stern, who told him to make an inventory of what the troopers had taken. The next day, Rusty went downtown and voluntarily provided a blood sample. He did not provide testimony. Stern advised him that a pretrial statement would chiefly give the prosecution material with which to prepare, and Rusty ultimately accepted that advice, despite his initial concern that refusing to testify would harm his standing among lawyers in the prosecutor’s office and elsewhere.

Evidence and Consequences

The carpet samples became central to the physical-evidence case. Fibers found on Carolyn’s clothing and body and in the living area were matched to samples taken from the carpeting in Rusty’s home. Alongside other evidence—including fingerprints identified from an old county employee card, telephone records showing a call from Rusty’s home to Carolyn’s, and biological evidence—those fibers helped form a case with no witness who claimed to have seen Rusty kill Carolyn and no uncontested confession.

The blood test further altered Rusty’s assessment of his position. It classified him as a secretor who produced A-type antibodies, like the man whose biological material had been found in the case. Rusty understood the chance of coincidence to be about one in ten and concluded that his opportunity for quick exoneration had passed. In May, he appeared before the grand jury and declined to answer thirty-six questions on the ground that his answers might incriminate him.

Narrative Significance

The search shows how an investigation can build pressure through the accumulation of ordinary, traceable details rather than a single decisive observation. The warrant’s limits did not prevent the collection of evidence that tied Rusty’s home to the crime scene; instead, carpeting and clothing became part of the prosecution’s argument. Yet the evidence remained circumstantial, and its significance depended on how each trace was interpreted and combined with the others.

For Rusty, the search also changed the meaning of his home and his professional identity. He had once investigated cases for the prosecution; now troopers were taking samples from his closet, and his own decisions about blood and testimony could be read as evidence in the case against him. The episode therefore marks both a practical escalation in the investigation and a personal reversal: the prosecutor’s methods had become the machinery of his defense and accusation alike.