A kid I had talked to several times called me to snitch off a meth dealer in Kerrville. He said the guy had just received couple of ounces and was in his apartment in the process of repackaging it into small single dose zip-locks as we spoke. He had been there just a few minutes earlier with some friends and had seen it for himself. The dealer would be selling it later that evening.
Believing the informant to be reliable, I quickly wrote an affidavit and rushed it over to the County Judge to get a search warrant for the apartment. Warrant in hand, I got another detective and a couple of patrol officers to accompany me to serve it.
The apartment was a small two-bedroom house. We knocked on the door, gained entry, and found several males inside. We isolated them in the living room. One of the patrol officers stood guard over the subjects. Before beginning the search, I shot a roll of film to document the apartment and subjects who were present. Then we began our search.
The second patrol officer, the other detective, and I searched cabinets and drawers throughout the house. We searched every box and container we could find. We searched the pantry and opened every box and bin that wasn’t still factory glued shut. We removed HVAC vents and looked inside the ducts. We unzipped sofa cushions and looked in pillows and under mattresses. We searched anywhere and everywhere in the apartment that might conceivably have been a hiding place for small zip-lock baggies, but to no avail. We spent hours. We found nothing.
After we released the scene, we returned to the police station to try and figure out what had gone wrong. I still had confidence that my snitch had been telling the truth. Did we miss a hiding place? Had the dealer moved the drugs before we got there? Had my snitch lied to me? Before I went home, I developed the film and made prints for the file.
The snitch phoned me back the next day, angry that we had missed the dope. The dealer had gone out that night and sold it as planned, he said. I told him how thoroughly we had searched and asked him if he had any idea where the dope might have been hidden. Although it was still in the open when he had seen it and phoned me, he said he had learned from one of the other guys in the apartment when we ran the warrant that they had finished repackaging the dope and put the little zip-locks between red plastic Solo cups that were stacked together on top of the refrigerator when we were there.
I pulled the photographs I had printed the previous evening and in one of the photos of the kitchen, there was a package of Solo cups on top of the fridge. Looking at the package closely, I could see that inside the clear plastic bag holding the cups the rims were unevenly spaced. Obviously, there was something in most of the cups that was preventing them from nesting snuggly. As thoroughly as we had searched everywhere else in the apartment, we had somehow missed that bag of Solo cups on top of the fridge.