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Sense-making software for crime investigation should be based on a model of reasoning about ev-idence that is both natural and rationally well-founded. A formal model is proposed that combines artificial intelligence formalisms for abductive inference to the best explanation and for defeasible argumentation. Stories about what might have happened in a case are represented as causal networks and possible hypotheses can be inferred by abductive reasoning. Links between stories and the avail-able evidence are expressed with evidential generalizations that express how observations can be inferred from evidential sources with defeasible argumentation. It is argued that this approach unifies two well-known accounts of reasoning about evidence, namely, anchored narratives theory and new evidence theory. After the reasoning model is defined, a design is presented for sense-making soft-ware that allows crime investigators to visualize their thinking about a case in terms of the reasoning model