“Cases of unwitnessed murders presented special problems under the law of Moses. While the two-witness rule would seem to stand insurmountably in the way of ever obtaining a conviction in such cases, such slayings could not simply be ignored. If a person was found slain in the land and the murderer could not be found, solemn rituals, oaths of innocence, and special purification of all the men in the village had to be performed (see Deuteronomy 21:1–9). Things turned out differently in Seantum’s case, however, for he was soon exposed in a way that opened the door to an exceptional rule of evidence that justified his conviction” (Welch, “Case of an Unobserved Murder,” 242–43).