What happened the night of the murder?

The 27-year-old computer voting specialist was last seen alive July 10, 2017 by the manager of a bar he frequented in the Columbia Heights neighbourhood in Washington DC.

It was a muggy night in the nation’s capital and Mr Rich had been venting that night to his bartender about the difficulties of balancing his 12-hour-a-day job with his love life.

After the bar closed around 1:45 am, the manager offered to call Mr Rich a cab to take him the mile-or-so to his house, but he refused and said he’d prefer to walk and was thinking about stopping by the nearby Wonderland Ballroom, according to police.

Some reports indicated that Mr Rich was highly intoxicated when he left the first bar, and it wasn’t later confirmed that he had actually stopped by the Wonderland Ballroom. What is evident, though, is that he chose to walk home through several dicey blocks in an area of town that was quickly gentrifying and seeing a surge in reports of crime.

Mr Rich was shot and killed around 4:20 am while on the phone with his girlfriend. What he did for the roughly two and a half hours between leaving that first bar and getting killed remains unclear.

Rumours quickly swirled on right-wing blogs and Twitter that Mr Rich’s death may have been politically motivated. Some even claimed – without evidence – that Democratic officials may have killed Mr Rich as revenge for the leak.

However, police said that the death was likely a robbery gone wrong and that they had no evidence his murder was related to his job at the DNC.

Police noted that there were several other armed robberies in the area that occurred in the days before his death. Seven arrests were made following his murder, and firearms were produced but they didn’t match the ballistics in Mr Rich’s death.