Who killed Victor Jara?

The notorious murder of the popular folk singer _ who became a symbol of resistance after he was tortured and shot to death in the chaotic first days of Chile's 1973 coup _ has never been solved.

The soldiers involved were ordered long ago to carry their secrets to their graves or face a similar fate. Jara's brutal death _ his hands were smashed, head beaten and body pumped with at least 44 bullets _ was meant as a warning to anyone who challenged Gen. Augusto Pinochet's authority during the long, dark years of Chile's dictatorship.

The climate of fear remains, even with two decades of democracy and Pinochet dead and buried. But some facts are finally emerging after 36 years of silence, institutional resistance, blind turns and myth-making about Jara, who was detained in a stadium with 5,000 other supporters of ousted President Salvador Allende.

His struggle and death have been immortalized by everyone from American folk singer Pete Seeger to Argentina's Los Fabulosos Cadillacs and the Irish rockers U2.

Because of the tenacity of his widow, Joan Jara, whose personal appeal encouraged stadium survivors to provide testimony and evidence to the courts, his murder case has regained momentum in the last year. Court investigators have methodically tracked down and interrogated hundreds of aging former soldiers who were drafted into Pinochet's army.

In June, Jara's body was exhumed for a proper autopsy. The family now has the resulting forensics report, the Victor Jara Foundation confirmed Wednesday, and has scheduled a news conference for Thursday. Ballistics and other evidence from the autopsy may help investigators identify who ordered the killing _ and who fired a handgun into Jara's skull that night.

"Where there is a bullet, there is a gun," Nelson Caucoto, Joan Jara's attorney, told The Associated Press. "Behind a draftee is the order of an officer _ we are interested in the officer."

While most former soldiers have refused to talk, one Army draftee, Jose Paredes, has described the murder and named the officers he said were responsible.

Paredes, now charged with Jara's murder, denies firing a machine gun into the singer's dying body. He said he told interrogators that a lieutenant known as "El Loco," the Crazy One, held Jara against a dressing room wall and played Russian roulette until a bullet blasted through the singer's skull.

Paredes described how a superior officer then ordered soldiers to finish Jara off and turn their Sig Sauer machine guns on 14 other detainees to eliminate witnesses inside the stadium, which has since been renamed Estadio Victor Jara as a memorial.