In the early morning hours of February 26, 1991, near Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, the body of 33-year-old Julie Snodgrass, an American mother and wife of a U.S. Air Force Sergeant, was discovered in her car. She had been the victim of a brutal attack, and the scene was chaotic.

The initial investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) pointed toward a robbery gone wrong, but as detectives dug deeper, they began to unravel a complex web of deceit, a forbidden affair, and a murder-for-hire plot orchestrated by the last person anyone wanted to suspect. The case would go cold, hinged on a single piece of evidence that the perpetrator himself had destroyed right before their eyes.

Julie and her husband, Sergeant Joseph “Joe” Snodgrass, were high school sweethearts. Their life was a whirlwind tour of military assignments, taking them from Germany to Montana before their final posting in the Philippines. By 1991, however, their marriage was deeply troubled.

They had separated, divorced, and then remarried, but the underlying tensions remained. The most significant of these was Joe’s ongoing affair with their young Filipina house helper, a woman named Lucy. The affair was an open secret, so much so that Lucy had reportedly even asked the couple’s young son, Josh, to start calling her “mom.”

When Joe Snodgrass reported his wife missing on the night of February 25, he claimed they had argued and she had left the base to cool off. With a solid alibi showing he never left the base himself, he was not an initial suspect.

But investigators’ suspicions grew as they learned more about the affair and a recently increased $400,000 life insurance policy Joe had taken out on his wife. Their focus turned to Lucy.

After multiple, grueling interrogations, she finally broke. She confessed that Joe had asked for her help to “dispatch” his wife, promising to take her to America to start a new life together. She admitted that she had recruited her two uncles, who in turn hired another man, to carry out the act in exchange for a small sum of money and a share of the insurance payout.

Armed with this confession, investigators confronted Joe. He coolly denied everything, calling Lucy a liar. The case was a frustrating stalemate: a powerful confession with no physical evidence to back it up. That is, until investigators discovered two floppy disks in Joe’s desk at work.

In a dramatic interrogation, they presented the disks to Joe. As the investigators were momentarily distracted, Joe seized his opportunity. He grabbed the floppy disks, pulled a pair of scissors from a drawer, and methodically cut them into dozens of pieces, destroying what he believed was the only concrete proof of his plan. For the investigators, this act of destruction was as good as a confession, but it also meant their single most important piece of evidence was gone.

In 1991, data recovery was a nascent field. The NCIS team sent the shredded plastic fragments to every expert they could find—from federal law enforcement to private sector pioneers. The answer was unanimous: the data was lost forever. The technology to reconstruct a physically shattered floppy disk simply did not exist. The case was on the verge of collapsing.

Refusing to give up, the investigators brought the bag of plastic shards back to their own computer forensics lab. In a moment of low-tech inspiration, a technician proposed a simple, almost absurd, idea: what if they just tried to tape it back together? What followed was a painstaking and ingenious feat of forensic recovery.

The technician took a new, blank floppy disk and carefully opened it. Then, piece by tiny piece, they took the surviving magnetic film from the original, shattered disk and meticulously reassembled it like a puzzle on the new platter, using a special, non-residue Scotch tape (the 811 model) to hold the delicate fragments in place.

After four failed attempts, on the fifth try, it worked. The computer whirred, and against all odds, the contents of the destroyed disk appeared on the screen.

The recovered file was the smoking gun. It was a document Joe had written, a letter addressed to his lover, Lucy. In it, he laid out his request for her to find people who could carry out the act against his wife. The letter ended with the damningly personal words, “I miss you and I love you,” irrefutably proving both the murder-for-hire plot and the illicit affair.

With this digital confession, the case was sealed. Joe Snodgrass was taken into military custody. During the chaotic aftermath of the Mount Pinatubo eruption in June 1991, he made a failed attempt to escape the base but was quickly recaptured. He was extradited to the United States, where he pleaded guilty.

In 1993, he was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. His accomplices in the Philippines received significantly lighter one-year sentences. The case of Julie Snodgrass became a landmark in the early days of digital forensics, a testament to how a little ingenuity and a roll of tape could piece together the truth and bring a mastermind to justice.