State Trooper Max DeLuca, criminal investigation assessment officer for Butler-based Troop D, discussesrevelations made by Lillian Webb, suspect Donald Eugene Webb's wife.

Fate brought Gregory Adams and Donald Webb together nearly four decades ago.

The two men could not have taken more different paths in life: Adams a law enforcer, Webb a lawbreaker.

Webb, a “career criminal” and small-scale jewel thief, according to the FBI, shot Adams, then Saxonburg's police chief, during a traffic stop.

Investigators can only speculate that Webb, from coastal New England, was in Saxonburg on Dec. 4, 1980, casing a small jewelry store to hit.

The mystery behind the traffic stop will never be solved, admitted State Trooper Max DeLuca, who is the cold case investigator for Troop D based in Butler.

Webb, then 49, who was already wanted for robbery in New York, apparently risked a violent faceoff with the 31-year-old Adams, ultimately shooting him twice, rather than a possible return trip to prison.

DeLuca characterized the clash as a “life or death struggle,” with Webb pulling a .25-caliber handgun. The FBI assessment was that Adams was “beaten about the head and face with a blunt instrument.”

But Adams, the trooper said, “fought like hell” against his much larger opponent.

At some point, according to Lillian Webb's recounting of what her husband would tell her, Adams bit Webb's lower lip.

She would get a first-hand look at it when Webb returned home hours after the deadly encounter in Saxonburg.

“She said he had an injury on his lip,” DeLuca said, “where it looked like his bottom lip had almost been bitten off.”

Lillian said the injury never fully healed.

Until the widow's disclosure, police never knew anything about that injury.

But Adams' heroic fight left Webb with another lifelong disability.

The chief apparently kicked Webb so hard that it broke his left ankle.

“To cause a compound fracture to someone's ankle,” DeLuca said, was proof of Adams' mettle.

It left Webb with a permanent limp, according to the findings of Webb's autopsy and his wife's recollection.

The explanation for that injury came as an unexpected revelation to investigators 37 years later.

While police had always suspected Webb's struggle with Adams left him with a leg injury, the de facto conclusion was that it was from the chief firing a shot before he died.

That, it turned out, was all wrong.

“(Lillian) told us (Webb) was not shot,” DeLuca said. Webb's autopsy also turned up no evidence of a gunshot wound.