Two days later, a revised version of that report was saved in the department’s records system under the administrative credentials of Chief Dewey Ratliff.

The revised version removes the EMS cancellation and the words unable to confirm, and describes the incident as a minor injury from a fall.

Both versions existed in the system.

That is the part everybody gets wrong about small-town record tampering: nothing gets deleted, because these are vendor-hosted databases with audit logs that a chief of police in a town of nineteen hundred does not administer and in most cases does not know exist.

A Texas Ranger named Tobias Kinnard pulled the audit log in the February with a warrant and it took about four minutes.