Why was Michael Turney arrested?
The abuse allegations “finally forced [police] to look at my sister’s case,” Sarah told Dateline in 2020. “If you asked me then if I thought my father had any involvement, I would have said no. But over the years, he had so many renditions of what happened that day. Something wasn’t right.”
Sgt. Cox told Dateline, “The totality of circumstances known to police prompted the focus on Michael Turney as the suspect.”
And on Dec. 11, 2008, Phoenix police searched the Turney home in connection with Alissa’s disappearance.
Investigators were mainly looking for documents, cassettes and videotapes, but to their surprise they found numerous guns, ammunition and 26 homemade pipe bombs, according to the FBI’s Phoenix division.
They also found a van on the property that was full of containers of propane and bleach and had nails packed into the wheel wells, Andersen said in Family Secrets. As he detailed in the documentary, they also found several envelopes in a safe, each made out to a different news outlet and containing a thumb drive. On the drive was a manifesto, shown in the doc, in which Michael accused the electricians’ union of being involved in Alissa’s kidnapping and murder, and shared his plan to exact revenge by driving his homemade bomb of a van into the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers’ union hall.
The document was titled “Diary of a Madman Martyr.”
When Michael was arrested that same day, he “had two pistols on his person,” Det. Stuart Somershoe told ABC News in 2009. “He had seven magazines filled with ammo. He had a knife. He had a recording device.”