Six-hours after her murder, Michael George had returned from the hospital to show the chief detective, Sgt. Steckman, around the small store, which was now a crime scene.

Don Steckman: And as soon as he walked in the back room, he looked and said there were two cardboard boxes full of very expensive comic books missing.

Dennis Murphy, Dateline NBC: So he's saying, "I had some expensive stuff back here."

Donald Steckman: Two boxes of comic books.

Dennis Murphy: And it's gone?

Donald Steckman: And they're gone.

Michael George made a list of stolen comics and estimated their value at $30,000.

He'd later file an insurance claim for vintage editions of "Spiderman," "Green Lantern," and "Iron Man," to name just a few.

Dennis Murphy: So he's talking about robbery is his likely scenario?

Donald Steckman: His whole scenario was it had to be robbery.

At the comic book shop, Michael George would tell the detective that he had no idea what had happened to his wife.

He'd last seen her, he'd said, a little after 4 p.m. when she'd relieved him behind the counter. He said he'd taken the couple's two kids over to his mom's and had remained there, taking a nap on her couch before returning to the store just after 8 p.m. Det. Steckman asked Michael George the questions a cop would when the wife has just been murdered.

Don Steckman: Let's get all this up straight. “Were there any girlfriends?" "No." "Were you having any affairs?" "No." Any problems with your marriage?" "No, everything was fine."

Dennis Murphy: Denied it all, huh?

Donald Steckman: Denied the whole thing.

Dennis Murphy: What are you seeing in demeanor, here it is about midnight?

Donald Steckman: The warning lights were going off, because he's walking us through a store where his wife died and never once showed any emotion.

Staff at the hospital that night thought the same thing as the detective: Michael George’s emotional thermostat remained oddly set on cool.

At the funeral, days later, Mary Shamo -- the girlfriend of Barb's brother -- couldn't make out what he was feeling because his eyes were concealed behind dark, dark sunglasses.

Mary Shamo: Like something that a blind person would wear, something you see Stevie Wonder wear.

And Mary’s sense that Michael was acting strange, even goofy, only increased after a visit to the trailer park home where Michael George and Barbara had lived. She and Joe -- Barb's brother -- had gone over to give Michael some support during tough days.

Mary Shamo: And he comes in and her vacuum's sitting there and he grabs the vacuum and he embraces the vacuum and he showed more emotion with this vacuum than he did the whole time.

Dennis Murphy: What's he saying to the vacuum?

Mary Shamo: And he's just saying, "Oh, this was Barb's vacuum." And, "Oh my God, she's never going to use this vacuum again." And then he would go to a blender and he's like, "She's never going to be in this kitchen again."

Dennis Murphy: Are you thinking, "What's up with this guy?"

Mary Shamo: And I am looking at him like he was a screwball.

At one point that night, Mary was alone with Michael in the kitchen, and the grieving widower seemed to let her in, she thought, on his charade.

Mary Shamo: Mike sat down at the kitchen table, whipped off his sunglasses and looked at me and says, "So, what do you think of all this, Mary?" And I looked at him like, "OK, was that just an act? Here you are grieving over a vacuum and all these appliances and there wasn't one tear in his eyes, there was no swelling going on in his eyes. He just -- he had nothing going on. It was all an act.

The police, meanwhile, were chasing down bank records and insurance policies, looking for leads on that speeding car, the man in the Greek fisherman's cap, and whether this could indeed have been a botched robbery, after all. And they were getting a crash course on the value of vintage comics.

Unhappily for them, the case detectives hadn't found the gun and hoped-for forensics like a bloody print just weren't there.

But the investigators were getting calls on the QT about Michael George maybe having a girlfriend.

Dennis Murphy: When did you learn about a shop assistant named Renee? A friend of both him and Barb?

Donald Steckman: That was two days later. We started receiving phone calls from people advising us that we might want to look at his relationship with his employee named Renee.

It was Barb George who'd met and befriended Renee Kotula at their children's school, and brought her to work at the comic book store. Renee had five children and needed the money. Her floundering marriage had ended in divorce just three weeks before Barb's murder.

Not long after they buried Barbara, Mary Shamo remembers dropping in unexpectedly at the comic book shop along with her boyfriend Joe and the pair got a shocker.

They saw Michael and Renee, the shop assistant, canoodling.

Mary Shamo: They didn't see us pull up, they were really loose and they were giggling together, and their arms were crossed over to each other. And when you lose somebody in your life you kind of look around at the world like, "What's going on? Why does the world keep moving when I’ve just lost somebody so important." And here this man is as happy as a clam. You wouldn't think that he had any care in the world, the way he was carrying on with her.

Dennis Murphy: And it wasn't long there after that Renee and Mike were living together, huh?

Mary Shamo: Oh yeah.

Michael and Renee would set up a new home together with the help of a $130,000 life insurance payout on Barb that he'd received as beneficiary.

Dennis Murphy: Is he becoming what cops call "a person of interest"?

Donald Steckman: Yes, at that point he was. At that point he had to be.

He'd talked to the police casually at the store that night, and then in a more formal interview at the police station six days later. But there would be no follow-ups. According to Det. Steckman, Michael George said he would hire an attorney.

Dennis Murphy: They'd stopped talking.

Donald Steckman: Exactly.

Dennis Murphy: So this is a big unsolved case?

Donald Steckman: Yes.

Dennis Murphy: Is it possible that somebody comes into that store and commits a botched robbery and poor Barb is shot. And it's not Mike George at all and that person is out there. Could it be that way?

Donald Steckman: I ruled that out, in my own mind. If that was true, and that was your wife that was killed in that robbery, wouldn't you want to do anything the police asked you to do? And everything we asked him to do, he either delayed us or refused to do.

The police investigators may have been stymied, but Michael George’s brother-in-law and his girlfriend Mary didn't have the same restraints. The two began nosing around as amateur detectives.

Mary Shamo: We actually went back to the store and we searched the whole grounds. We were looking for a gun. We went everywhere. We went by his trailer. We looked through his garbage. I mean we just--from the very beginning -- we knew he did it.

But Mary’s Nancy Drew sleuthing didn't produce anything.

The investigation was going nowhere, slipping fast into what cops call the cold-case file.

There was someone out there, though, who did have a vital piece of information about the night of the murder. But his story had slipped through the cracks and would be ignored for the next 17 years.

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