Investigators for decades labored under the false assumption that Saxonburg Police Chief Gregory Adams shot Donald Webb in the leg before Webb sped away from a deadly traffic stop on Dec. 4, 1980.

That was not the only mistaken premise that endured the entire investigation.

Police believed Webb drove away in his white Mercury Cougar, which he left at a Howard Johnson's parking lot in Warwick, R.I., before he presumably got help for a ride home to New Bedford, Mass.

But Webb's widow, Lillian, told Trooper Max DeLuca, criminal investigation assessment officer at the Butler state police barracks, and other investigators that she was the one who put the car where authorities would eventually find it two weeks after Adams' murder.

First, however, the injured Webb drove the car back to New Bedford, and started looking for his wife — for help.

“When he first came back,” DeLuca said, “she's walking out of an acquaintance's house, bam, she sees the car, the white Mercury Cougar, with Donald in it. She sees his leg is injured.”

Lillian and a female friend, a nurse who has since died, took him to Tobey Hospital in Wareham, Mass, a 20-minute trip.

She claimed her husband didn't immediately “get into” what happened to cause his injuries. DeLuca was skeptical of that claim and believed Lillian soon knew what happened.

Webb was admitted under the alias “John Thomas,” DeLuca said, and treated for a compound fracture of the left ankle.

At that time he had not been identified as a suspect in Adams' killing.

Back in Pennsylvania, however, the heat was on police to find the killer of their brother in blue. The FBI joined in. They soon theorized from blood and eyewitness evidence that Webb had been shot by Adams during the struggle.

“Everyone's looking for someone with a gunshot wound to the leg,” DeLuca said, “when in reality (Webb's injury) was a compound fracture that was bleeding.”

Lillian, the loyal and loving wife, had only begun to aid and abet her hospitalized husband.

Later, she hopped in Webb's car — a puddle of blood on the driver's floor board from his bleeding leg and lip injuries in the altercation with Adams — and drove it 40 miles to the Howard Johnson hotel.

It was not some random dump job.

“She said she put it there because she knew it was a visible location,” DeLuca recounted. “She picked that specifically because she wanted the car to be seen and she wanted to keep the FBI busy putting surveillance on the car.”

The crafty Lillian had more tricks up her sleeve.

“She said when she parked it, she put the seat all the way back and she tilted the driver's mirror up,” DeLuca said, “so it would look like a large person was driving the car.”

The maneuver by the former singer at the “Orchid Room,” a one-time club in Massachusetts operated by mobsters, impressed the seasoned criminal investigator.

“This girl knows to do that on her own,” DeLuca said. “She's been around enough wise guys growing up. She's street smart.”

Still, she wasn't finished. She checked the trunk and found a Pennsylvania license plate.

“She took it out and buried it,” DeLuca said. He speculated Webb used the plate while casing jewelry stores to break into.

Someone, Lillian wouldn't say who, gave her a ride back home.

With Webb in the hospital under an assumed name, an unlikely source gave Lillian an unexpected heads up.

“A law enforcement officer that knew Lillian told her, 'Hey, they're looking for your husband. They think he had something to do with the shooting in Saxonburg,'” DeLuca said.

“That's how Lillian's tipped off.”

Now on the alert, she all but clammed up to anyone and resorted to “evasive driving” trips to the hospital, DeLuca said.

“She knew she was being followed and believed her phones were tapped,” he said. “She could tell when people were following her and if she couldn't lose them, she wouldn't meet (Webb). She wouldn't see him.”