Homicide trial — Case presentation
From a Kaleidoscope of Evidence to a Guilty Verdict
A six-week homicide trial. Three counties. 100GB of digital evidence. Here’s how the Whatcom County Prosecutor’s Office used Lumyx to turn a sprawling, out-of-order body of evidence into a courtroom timeline a jury could follow — and convict on.
- Exhibits admitted
- 430
- State witnesses
- 80+
- Digital evidence
- 100GB
- Trial length
- 6wks
The challenge
A body-dump case with no easy starting point
The victim, a homeless man, was found with no identification. The investigation stretched across three Washington counties and produced 1,100 pages of discovery, 100GB of digital evidence, and cell-tower and location data (AT&T NELOS) with accuracy radii as wide as 5,000 meters — all of it needing to be corroborated and made sense of before it could go anywhere near a jury.
A “kaleidoscope” of testimony
With 80+ state witnesses and 430 exhibits spread across a six-week trial, testimony came in out of chronological order — witnesses recalled to the stand days apart, evidence introduced piecemeal. Prosecutor John Allgire needed a way to reassemble it into a single, digestible narrative a jury could actually follow.
The solution
Cell data becomes a map
Allgire dropped the NELOS location data directly into Lumyx and used it as the investigation’s backbone — corroborating imprecise cell-tower pings against surveillance video of the suspect’s van to establish a reliable path.
Every exhibit, tagged and sequenced
As the trial progressed, Allgire tagged each Lumyx event with its trial exhibit number — so testimony given weeks apart could be instantly recalled in order: “remember exhibit 242.”
Testified live, off the timeline
Washington courts permitted Allgire to testify directly from Lumyx — navigating the map and timeline live on the stand, and revising the case in real time after a judge’s ruling excluded part of the evidence mid-trial.
The result — verdict & impact
A Guilty Verdict, and a Day of Deliberation Saved
The jury convicted on every count. The judge handed down the maximum sentence — a rarity in Washington State. And afterward, jurors told the court the Lumyx timeline had done work they’d expected to do themselves.
- Verdict
- Guilty
- Sentencing
- Maximum
- Deliberation saved
- ~1day
- Allgire’s first Lumyx trial
- Yes
It easily saved us a day of deliberation. The jury said they’d planned to rebuild our timeline themselves from their notes — and told us there was no need. We got it. We understood. We followed along.
Beyond the verdict
Cold cases, reopened
Allgire’s office now uses Lumyx as a “digital war room” for cold cases — preserving institutional knowledge and bringing new investigators and prosecutors up to speed in minutes instead of weeks.
Leverage in plea negotiations
In a separate case, Lumyx surfaced a gap between a suspect’s statement and his own device data — timed exactly to the offense. Presented to the defense, it left them, in Allgire’s words, “no answer.”
An appeals-ready record
Screen recordings of the live courtroom presentation were captured automatically, giving the prosecutor’s office a complete record for the appellate court.
The takeaway
What used to take a war room, a stack of binders, and a prosecutor’s memory now lives in one timeline.
Lumyx turned 100GB of disconnected evidence into a narrative a jury could follow — and convict on — the first time Allgire took a case built in Lumyx to trial.