(gentle music) (ominous music) - [Narrator] Just before sunrise, on the morning of Saturday March 27 2010, a steelworker was arriving for his shift at the north base of the MacKay Bridge in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. There was something red laying at the base of one of the massive concrete abutments on the frozen earth. As he moved closer, he
realized it was a person. - [Reporter] Holly Bartlett
was found unconscious under the MacKay Bridge after
a night out with her friends. - [Reporter] The 31 year old's death in March 2010 was ruled an accident. - [Narrator] Holly died in hospital less than 48 hours after she was found. Within 72 hours, police had
ruled her death accidental, and the case was closed. - The initial police investigation was wrapped up really quickly. Drunk blind girl? Case closed. - There's a lot of hours in there that we don't know where she was. - This has become one case that was never solved,
and it should've been. - I really would like to
know what happened to Holly. Somebody knows. (somber music) Holly was born on Boxing Day, 1978. One of the nurses came up, and said to me, so you know your daughter is blind. I was floored. (gentle piano music) She's a middle child,
very strong personality, and even as a little preschooler, you know, she persevered. - My name is Holly Bartlett,
and I'm 30 years old, and I live in Halifax, Nova Scotia. When I was born, I had an eye condition called microphthalmia,
which in layman's terms means small eyes. When I lost my vision
around the age of 13, that was a rather traumatic experience, but everything at 13 is traumatic. - She always appeared
confident, even when she wasn't. And she was very stubborn, but she was also very
kind, and very loving. I remember one day I was driving, and here's my sister,
walking down the street, with her white cane. I hollered out the window,
"Holly, it's Amanda!" She said, "I know it's you." And I said, "Where are you going?" "Yoga." Okay! Call me later. But she always had a there
was nothing to lose attitude. We were driving down the street one day, and she said yeah, last
weekend I went skydiving. Okay. Here she was going out on the weekends, doing assisted riding, and winning medals, and ribbons, and trophies. - I am involved with swing dance. I volunteer on a board for
a nonprofit organization. I am completing part-time my masters in public administration. - She had friends, she
had a social calendar. She always wanted to be known not because of her disability, right? - She wasn't scared of going places, and she was quite fine to do
that without being accompanied. And I think she taught
herself how to do that, because she didn't wanna
depend on anybody else. That's how independent she was. I was too young to realize
what a good sister she was, and what a good aunt she was to my kids, and I just miss having her around. I miss her jokes. I miss her calling and
asking me to pick her up, and me getting irritated. (Amanda chuckles) - I miss her laugh. I miss her laugh. - I miss it all. I just miss her, I miss (sniffles) I miss my sister. - I had 150% confidence
that the police department would do a thorough investigation. - I remember when I went into the room, and I saw my parents, and there was a police officer there, and my mother looked at me and said, "They'll find out what happened, Amanda. "They're gonna find out." Because it can't be that hard. She's four foot nothing blind woman who everybody knew on her street. Someone has to know. We had confidence that
we'd get the answer. - He told us Monday morning, when he came, that no foul play is suspected. They didn't even have the autopsy done. - I said, Mom, ask the police officer if the cab driver had GPS on their car. At least then we can rule out, you know, that she was dropped off
at the wrong spot, or, the answer was Mrs. Bartlett,
you watch too much CSI. (intense music) She had just buried her daughter. - It was right then and there that I knew that we would never find
out what happened to Holly. - It's hard not knowing. It's hard picturing my
sister underneath a bridge. She was laying underneath the bridge for five hours, freezing. - They treated the case as
poor little drunk blind girl. Her death deserved a proper investigation. Somebody out there knows
exactly what happened on March 26th, somebody knows. (keyboard clacking) - I was working as a
journalist at the time, but I never covered it. I just remember thinking,
something's not right. In the weeks following Holly's death, answers were scarce, if not non-existent. The biggest problem here is that the investigation was impeded in the first three days, because there was an
assumption that was made that Holly got drunk, and oh
well, nothing to see here. (ominous music) - [Narrator] Police maintain
Holly was dropped off at the entrance to her condo building, right at the front door. Investigating officers
theorized that Holly, drunk and disoriented, stumbled away from her home. (suspenseful music) Officers believe she
had wandered 350 meters from her front door to the
apartment building at Kencrest, crawled through a hole in the fence, crawled up a very steep
abutment under the bridge, and then fell 10 meters
to the ground below. Her family never found out
how she sustained the injury, blunt force trauma to the head, that, along with hypothermia, would
ultimately claim her life. Security footage from above
immediately ruled out jumping. Holly was never on the bridge that night. (somber music) Peter and Holly met through the Canadian National
Institute for the Blind, or CNIB, as it's known today. I can only imagine how painful
and traumatic this has been for you, and for everyone
that cared for Holly to kind of revisit. As soon as this happened, you
were upset and freaked out, and concerned that this
wasn't being handled, thank you, appropriately? - Yeah, a group of us went.
- Went to the site. - Yeah, went to the site.
- Below the MacKay Bridge. - Exactly, because it didn't make sense in our minds, and it made less sense when we actually walked the alleged walk. (somber music) - [Maggie] Holly used
a cane to get around. Peter's job was to teach her
new routes through the city. - As an orientation and
mobility specialist, I taught blind and
partially sighted adults how to travel safely and independently. She had the best skills of any client I had ever worked with. - [Maggie] Peter, his father Brian, and friends of Holly's, began looking into what
happened on their own. They called their group Justice for Holly. - I started in the policing world. I worked criminal investigations
most of my career. Retired from the military, and opened my own investigation company. - I guess we're gonna do another left turn up Holly's driveway. When I first heard from the police about what they thought happened, I just said it made no sense from an orientation mobility standpoint, knowing Holly's skills. - When the police
interviewed the taxi driver, he said Holly got out of
the driver's side door. Furthest away from the building. If their theory was correct, how would she have handled this? - Well, first of all, she
would get out of the right side like she did so many times, but if she started walking away, and didn't contact the door,
or the curb really quick, she would know she was
going the wrong way then. This is where she lived. It would've been so automatic for her to get out the right side. When she walked away from the cab, she walked the opposite direction
to her apartment building. She went down the road. This decline is actually so obvious. - Well, I can feel it. You feel yourself sliding
forward almost in your shoes as you come down the hill. - When Holly first felt when
walking down her driveway, which is a decline, she'd be walking towards that traffic, so we'd call that perpendicular
traffic in front of her. - So coming around the
corner here onto Northridge. So you've turned the
corner, and you're Holly. What do ya hear? - So now the traffic that was
perpendicular is now parallel. Parallel on the left side. Having the parallel traffic
on the left would mean they were walking away from her driveway. - What do you think the odds are if she came down that hillside, she'd know the bridge was above her? - [Peter] You're hearing traffic going over a bridge right now. - So she'd know exactly where
she was if she got this far. - I would think so. - I'm still grasping
with why would you get a cab ride home where it's safe, know you got let out where it's safe, and then make this walk to here? It doesn't make any sense. Would a blind person go where they don't know where they're going? - No. - Would it make sense for
them to crawl up to a fence, or go to a fence and try
to crawl through a hole? - It makes no sense to me. - They didn't stop to see how somebody who is blind would function. If you don't know how a
blind person functions, how do you investigate that? How can you have a theory
that she made this trek all the way to the bridge, and did all the things that they alleged that
she did, or they believed? And they tried to prove their assumptions instead of proving the case. (somber music) - [Maggie] When the police found Holly, Holly's cane was nowhere to be seen. According to police records, they searched the area where Holly was found
that Saturday morning. But when their first
searches were conducted, the officers didn't even know Holly used a cane in her everyday life. - The police were talking
to us, and I said, "Well, did you find her cane?" And he said, "No, we
didn't find her cane." And I said, "Well, she didn't
go anywhere without her cane." So you find her cane, and
that'll tell you everything. (dramatic music) - [Maggie] Holly died on
Sunday, March 28, 2010. - Hi. - [Peter] Hi, nice to meet you Rendell. - [Rendell] Rendell. - [Maggie] That same
day, only hours later, Rendell Pittman was
searching through the brush along the steep hill
leading below the bridge, and all around that area where police had already removed their yellow tape. - At the time, we were able to walk along the edge of the building here. - Right. - And it was a clear path.
- Right. So all the bushes and stuff I see have grown up a lot since then, yeah. - Quite a bit. It was mostly small shrubbery. As we came down along, so we gotta get down closer to the fence. So we-
- Looks like loose rock here. - Yeah. We came down around. And walked around. This fence wasn't there,
but it was right there. That time of year,
there's no leaves around. That's it!
- Yeah, I found it. I have found Holly Bartlett's cane inside of the fence, behind
an apartment building. (somber music) But she was found on the
other side of the fence. This is Holly Bartlett's cane. - Once we saw, and found it, you could easily see it
from up on top of the bank. - Right. So if the police went around
like they said they did, they would've seen that. - Exactly, yeah. - [Maggie] If the cane
really was sitting there all day Saturday, that entire night, and the next morning, wouldn't somebody have seen it? And how could police have missed it, when Rendell Pittman and his family came across it so easily? - How is it that Halifax Police, a dog, and all these experts were there, and they didn't see this. It begs the question, where
did her cane come from? How come her cane wasn't there
at five o'clock on Saturday, but at five o'clock on Sunday, it was there in plain view? - [Maggie] Why would Holly
have left her cane there? Why was it out of her backpack? - How do you think the cane got there? - If she had dropped it, it would've just been on the ground. The way it was placed, stood up like that, it looked to me like it was staged. - [Maggie] Rendell and his family waited two hours for police to arrive. This appears in police documents, too. Photographs were taken, and
the evidence was seized. (somber music) - If somebody dropped it there afterwards, why would they have put it so visibly? Why risk the possibility
of being caught or seen? There had to be people in
that apartment building looking out the window at what
the police were doing there. They had to have watched it, and that cane, if it was that visible, should've been spotted. (eerie music) - [Maggie] Thanks for coming, I'm Maggie. - Maggie, nice to meet ya.
- Really nice to meet you. - [Peter] Hi Kelly, I'm
Peter, nice to meet you. - [Maggie] So Kelly, when was this the building that you ran? - 2007 to 2015. - Tell us about when you
found out that it was Holly. - I remember it was a Friday
night that this had happened. - [Maggie] Right. - I typically would've done
my rounds around midnight, outside and then inside. - [Maggie] Even in the winter? - Yes, oh yes. But that night, I did my rounds around 11. And I came back here, there was nothing. I came around the front, and then the sides there were some people on that side of the building
that were having cigarettes. It's a Friday night. - Right.
- Right. - People were on their balconies. Then I went to sleep at about two a.m., and I was up in my unit, and I didn't hear a thing. I didn't hear any-
- Nothing? - Nothing. - Just supposing if she
had been down there, if she called out for help, do you think it's possible
that anybody along this wall, if they happened to
have their windows open like you did at the time,
would've heard something? - Absolutely. Midnight is not late around
here on a weekend night. - Yeah.
- Yeah. - Did the police ever reach out to you? - God, it was a couple of months later. - A couple months? - I believe so, it was
two or three months later. I had said that I had
seen or heard nothing. - What about security cameras? Anything like that back here? - Well, at that time I did
have one in the back here. Those have since been discarded. - Nobody asked you about
security cameras at the time? - Nobody asked me about it, no. - The police, when they came, didn't- - No, no, no. - So the security cameras,
I'm really curious as to, it would just look over the parking lot? It wouldn't necessarily see down by where she was found,
or anything like that? - [Kelly] No, it was a wide angle camera that caught the whole parking lot. - [Maggie] To learn
that there was a camera that could've been reviewed immediately that nobody ever asked
for it or reviewed it is, just unbelievable. The footage could've been everything. To see what was on it,
or even what wasn't. (somber music) - The story the police had
said that her friend said that she was the drunkest
that they'd ever seen her. Obviously, you need to
determine, is that the case? Did she really have that much to drink? - Just gonna come up here on the right, in the location where
the Fireside used to be. - She went out to dinner with Moira. - Yeah. - By her account, they'd had two drinks. (people chattering)
(gentle music) So you gotta remember,
too, she'd consume food while she was having her drinks, so there was something
there for the alcohol. And then they left there. They walked down the
road to the liquor store. - So this is what used to be
the Clyde Street Liquor Store. - They purchased a bottle of wine. They went to Jeff Brown's house party where they consumed the bottle of wine. And then we know that
somebody had made a martini, and that person didn't like it, and Holly had said that
she'd like to try it. So she tasted it, but whether
she consumed it or not, we're not sure. (people chattering) Then they left shortly thereafter 'til they went to the
graduation party ceremonies. They'd basically walked arm in arm, and Moira said that they
were both a little tipsy. Then when they got to the function, Holly insisted on having another drink. Following that, she was
seen seated drinking water. So that was the last of the
alcohol that we could track, and that was through the
witnesses that were there at the graduation as well. - [Maggie] This is an important detail, that Holly had switched to water. By all accounts, it looks
like she was slowing down, getting ready to call it a night. She could've stayed out partying, she could've kept drinking, but Holly had plans the next
morning with her study group. She was going to visit her dad later. (phone ringing) She made the first call
for a taxi at 11:18 p.m., but Holly wanted to stay, and the first taxi was
either canceled or ignored. The second cab was called at 11:55 p.m. Erica led Holly outside to it. - And when I asked her,
did you have any reason to believe that Holly was intoxicated beyond the point of being
able to do things normally, or function normally? And she said no, or she would've never let her go in the cab. And when I asked her when
she left the function, did you have to help her up the stairs? She said no, only guide
her, and that was it. She had steady walk, and
she had coherent speech. And we were able to track five, possibly six drinks
between six and midnight. It just didn't amount to drunk
blind girl gets disoriented. (cane tapping) - We all know that a man
who's six four and 225 pounds, scientifically, is better
equipped to handle six drinks over the course of six hours. Holly was tiny. She was four foot 11,
weighed just over 100 pounds. - I'm Jim Wigmore.
- Hi, Jim. - I'm a forensic toxicologist. - I was wondering if you
could summarize your findings. - According to the toxicology report, the alcohol level was at
slightly over the legal limit at the time the blood was taken. - So, if Holly was just over the legal limit for driving at 10:30 a.m., what would the blood alcohol
level be 10 hours earlier? - She would've eliminated, at a low rate, 10 milligrams of alcohol in 100 milliliters of blood per hour. - Holly's reading
would've been around 190, which is about 2 1/2 times
the legal driving limit. - The alcohol level that you get depends on your height, age,
weight, and gender, basically. - Yes. - I was also given that she was observed to have approximately six drinks. Those six drinks would give her a much higher blood alcohol
concentration than a large male. - It's impossible for us to comment on how her body specifically tolerated and metabolized alcohol, and we'll never know exactly what her experience of
drunkenness was that night. (gentle piano music) It was a cold, winter's night. It was minus six degrees, it was windy, the ground was frozen. Would alcohol really be enough to explain why Holly would wander down this long path and end up crawling through
a hole in the fence? Is it possible to tell,
based on the figures, whether somebody was disoriented or not? - So you have alcohol intoxication, which would cause some disorientation. Then as we have increasing hypothermia, the brain starts shutting down and you start having bizarre behavior. You can have, some victims before they die will take their clothes off. Some will hide underneath holes. It's called a tunneling syndrome. What's happening is your
body in reaction to the cold cuts off the blood supply
to the arms and legs. Now the problem with alcohol
is it causes blood flow to the arms and the legs. Your body's trying to
prevent the cold loss, but alcohol is stopping that, so you're more likely to
have hypothermia with alcohol than without alcohol, and have it induced at a faster rate because you're losing all that heat. - [Maggie] When Holly was
found, she was fully clothed. There was no evidence of
disrobing, of tunneling. She exhibited none of
those signs of symptoms. (gentle music) In 2010, the abutments were in a fenced area that was locked. To the north of the fence is the look off overlooking Africville Park. To the east are the roads
right alongside the coastline, overlooking the water. To the south is the fence line that rests below the parking lot at Kencrest apartment building, where it joins the west side fence, and that runs alongside the foot path that leads to Africville Park. - If that is our focal point right there, I'm just trying to look at
all the different avenues she could've followed
to come down in here. My entire career was
spent as a police officer. 15 years of it as a homicide investigator. - We wanna get up on top
of the abutment to see exactly where they suggest Holly went. (tense music) - [Thomas] This is a
hell of an embankment. - Yeah, it's very steep. Wow, I can't see- - Holly would know this, right? - Yeah. Her alarm bells would be going off if she took a few steps up this slope. Also, again, the sound
of the bridge traffic, which is, well, different. You can kinda tell you're under the sound. But holy steep.
- Yeah. - Can't imagine taking a- - The degree of angle is a
lot more than I ever thought. - Yeah. I can't imagine taking
more than a couple steps before you turn around. - So if she came in from this side. - How do you know that? - According to the police. - Okay. - Then she would've had
to come across, right? - Oh, wow. Okay, so. According to the police, she
came in through this fence. - Yeah. - Well, if she came in here, why the hell would she walk all the way around the
other side of this thing? - [Maggie] Yeah, exactly. - Why not walk up that ramp? - Yeah. - That's the most closest to her entry point, so that's logical. Either went around the back.
- Yep. - Or around the front. - But why? - Why is she here? - What the hell is she doing up here? - Why is she here? Why is she here? - Yeah.
- Right. - That is the most secluded
spot in that entire building. - [Maggie] It would be
the darkest spot, yeah. - Behind that little nook.
- No windows. - Parking lot's over here.
- No lights. - That's the most secluded, isolated spot in that whole building, and the cane just happens
to be found below here. I do not believe in coincidences. I think we can just walk up. - Okay, here we go. (ominous music) - Wow. I would think this is
more than 20 feet down. They estimated she was found- - [Maggie] Right where
that pole is in the corner. - [Thomas] 12 1/2 feet over. - So if she crawled, as they say, that's quite a steep, long crawl, but as you're crawling, of course your hands are going first. - Yeah, right? - Why would you keep going
after your hand reached, reached a drop off? - I mean, she would have to know- - There's nothing there.
- Yeah. I can't see how she could, unless she walked up. But if she went hands and knees. - But why would she, though? Even thinking about, like at this angle. Like what would make you think that you were heading somewhere- - The angle is very surprising to me. Even if she's intoxicated.
- Yeah. - It would be worse, right? - Something is not right here.
- Yeah. Wouldn't you be more
likely to go off a side than all the way to the top, if you were to fall, you know? - If you're going to the
top, what are you going to? - Yeah, exactly. - You know, some will say oh, she's walking towards the traffic. - Yeah, yeah. - But she would know better than that. - Taxi dropped her off at home. Why is she walking towards traffic? - Yeah. - If, in fact, Holly came up here, if you give it a rub, see that white dust? - Yeah.
- That's cement dust. So, her pants, if she came
up on her hands and knees, would have cement dust. - Do you think it would
still be there now? - Sure, why not? - Because Marion- - If the pants weren't washed. - Marion has them. If we can test her clothing and her shoes, we might be able to confirm whether she was actually
on that abutment or not. (tense music) - As far as the court's concerned, any continuity with this stuff is gone. All I know is none of
this stuff is washed, and that's important to me. So there's two areas we'd
be looking for material. One would be on the knees of her pants, and the other would be
the toes of her shoes. I wanna look at the shoes first. Okay, the first thing I notice, there is a pattern of scrapes, for lack of a better word. (camera clicks) This is all discoloration. That means it's been done for a while. This all looks fairly old to me. If Holly would've gone up that
ramp on her hands and knees. - [Peter] The toes would be- - [Thomas] I would expect to
see those toes torn to hell. - [Peter] It's almost not as
much what you see on them, but what you don't see when you're talking about
the toes in particular. - Yeah, we look at the ends where the vinyl was rubbed off it? It's all dark in color. Now that looks fresher. See how it's a lighter color? - [Maggie] That's going
in the other direction. - Yeah. The thing that sticks out
about that side of her shoe, there's not much there. - So what you would expect to see, given the journey that she is, you know, purported to
have gone on that night, that this is not adding
up at first glance. - No. So we're looking at her pants. Okay, so it's a tear. Another tear, same direction. - If you're crawling
through a hole in the fence, call me crazy, but you'd think
it would go the other way. Like, vertically. - That's assuming it came from the fence. - Right, well that's, yes. I mean-
- That could be a rock. That could be glass, it could be anything. And if you look at her buttocks area. And we have what I assume looks like dirt radiate between both
sides of her buttocks. This would be slightly below the knee.
- Yeah. - [Thomas] Some staining
on the front here. - Now what about the
concrete dust you spoke of- - The concrete dust, I would guess that would be around the knee somewhere. This would be in the area
of her knee, this area here. There's nothing visible here. - To the naked eye,
there's no concrete dust on the knees of Holly's jeans. There's no scuff marks on her boots. It doesn't look like there's any trace to suggest that she did
crawl up that abutment. (phone ringing) Just wanted to kind of clarify my request. I tried to secure an interview with the chief medical
examiner of Nova Scotia, Dr. Matt Bowes, and the doctor who performed Holly's
autopsy, Dr. Marnie Wood. They wouldn't talk to me,
but they did talk to Tom. - The first thing I
wanted to clear up was, did Holly have leg fractures? As it turns out, the radiologist did find two on her left
leg, and one on her right. - So like compression fractures? - No, no. You're looking at them,
it's a crack in the bone. Serious enough that they
would probably cast it. We started going through
the post mortem pictures, and the legs, specifically
around her knees, considerable bruisings and abrasions. Buttocks on the right side had
a fairly substantial bruise, and on the left buttocks
there was two or three equally substantial bruises,
but they were smaller. - I can't imagine that bruising would be the result of a fall that severe. You just look at the height, and you picture a compressed
spine, or a spinal cord injury, shattered bones. This doesn't look, to me, like a fall from 20 feet
to the frozen earth. - Regarding Holly's head. I do not recall seeing any abnormalities pertaining to the exterior of the skull. Personally, as an investigator,
I find that interesting because in cases where you have death caused by blunt force trauma to the head- - That's the key location. - You usually see some type of bruising, bleeding, hematoma, something. Nothing. Overview of the brain, there
was a subdural hemorrhage present at the base of the skull, so back of the brain. Oriented more towards the right side. - So what you're saying is on the outside, there was nothing visible. - No, except for this one little- - Except that spot.
- That one little spot. - And then the rest of
the damage was internal, like actually inside. - Yes.
- The brain, okay. - Dr. Wood advises that these
types of trauma injuries to the brain are caused by falls, or impact to the head area. Not specific. Could be being hit by something, it could be tripping and falling. One of the things that
jumped out at me first was the palms of Holly's hands. Palms are almost, I'd say almost pristine, but when you look at
the backs of her hands, that's where you start seeing scrapes, and picks, and cuts, and all of the wounds on the
hand require a closer look. The face injuries, I think, are the ones that took
me off guard the most. I didn't recognize Holly when I saw her, in the face shots from the morgue, because of swelling.
- Yeah. - And discoloration. Bruising, and cuts, and
contusions to her lips, both inside and outside. - You mean the- - Mouth injuries, yeah. It was a substantial blow to this area, but a fall, a hit or
something, we don't know. - With the face being
the receiving location, if you're falling, you
know, you picture, like, putting your hands out. - If you take a child,
or an 80 year old person, and if they start to
fall, or if they jump, the hands always come out to the sides. - Splayed, yeah. - It just, it's the way we are wired. - How do you get injuries
on the back of your hands? - Let me ask you this question. Have you ever put your hands up in front of your face to
protect it, like this? - Yeah.
- For what? - You know, fighting with someone. - Okay. Instinct is to go like this. To me, it's a conscious thought to cover your face like that. - This changes everything. If Dr. Wood can be convinced that Holly's death
wasn't a fatal accident, if we can provide evidence
that disproves that theory, the medical examiner's office can reclassify the manner of death, and compel the police to
reopen the investigation. And there's one other
thing we need to look into, the last known person to see Holly alive, and that's the taxi driver. (tense music) In 2010, Brian spoke with
police about Paul Fraser, the taxi driver who drove
Holly home that night. - I believe it was their
first trip with him where they rode in the
back of his taxi cab. This is what he had told to police was it was a normal
fare, he picked her up. She was helped in the vehicle by others, and he drove her home. She paid him, got out of the cab, walked across the street
in the wrong direction, and he drove off. And their first take on it was that Paul Fraser was
the salt of the earth. - My dad began his own
investigation for the family. As he went to the scene, he saw that at the bottom
of Holly's driveway, there's a number seven
bus that sits there. That number seven bus
was the bus, by the way, that Holly would catch
every morning to go to work. - Brian's idea was,
what if there was a bus waiting there near Convoy Towers, when Holly was dropped off that night? And if there was, did the
bus driver see anything? It turns out Brian was right. There was a number seven bus waiting there when Holly was dropped off that night, and it was equipped with a video camera. - I tried to get the
bus video, but no luck. We pushed to find out where
it was, and could we see it. But the police said no. - They couldn't give it to
him for privacy reasons. So when he handed the
case back to the police, that was his advice. First thing you need to do
is watch this bus video. - I insisted, I asked, will you please watch it in its entirety, everything? Not just when the cab comes in, and goes back out, end of case. Watch the rest of it. (ominous music) They reviewed that video. Now, I never did see the video, but this is what they said. We saw the cab sitting at the intersection of Kencrest and Novalea, waiting to turn right,
right signal light on. - [Peter] So they should
have been long gone. They'd be off to another fare. - [Maggie] Right. - Or whatever on a
Friday night at midnight. He was turned around like
as if he was coming back towards Holly's condo. - The police determined
that he did come back. (suspenseful music) so they needed to interview him again to find out why he omitted
that the first time. He then says, "Well, I'm not proud of
something I did that night." (ominous music) When she walked away from the cab, she walked the opposite direction
to her apartment building. She tripped on the curb and fell. And so he said, "I went down the road, "and almost immediately turned around, "and came back to check on her." Within two minutes, as
we'd discover later. The police then went to the theory, well, she tripped on the curb. Must have fallen and hit her head, and added to her impaired state, and her disorientation, and
now she's really in trouble. Police had said to me, I know you're gonna wanna talk to him, and we've already told him
you'll probably be calling him. So, I called Mr. Fraser, and
I met with him at his house. I knew right off the bat,
something was strange. He had just spoken to police about it, and they had just told him that I was going to be there to ask him questions about this. He played it almost that he didn't know, he couldn't remember. He said oh, did that happen back in May? He was very evasive. He had said that he didn't tell police that Holly was drunk
when he took her home. However, the police had
told me the cab driver knew that she was intoxicated. He said he didn't stop anywhere. He gave me the description
of the street, the travel, how they got to Holly's
apartment building. So I asked him at that point if he would accompany me over to the site so we could lool kat this in detail, and he could show me
exactly how it transpired. (ominous music) He had told me that he had lied to police. He saw her get into the cab,
but he focused on the fact that he had never looked at her. He said she slid right over behind him. They drove all the way home, there was no conversation whatsoever. She never spoke to him. He said she was just busy, she was rummaging in her
purse the whole time, and I said, "What do you
suppose she was looking for?" And he said, "She might've
been looking for her cane." And I looked at him, paused for a moment, and he said, "Wait, I
couldn't have known that. "I didn't know she was blind." Someone must have planted that in my mind. He had dropped her off,
and she had tripped. He had left, returned. He said she wasn't anywhere to be seen, and I said, "Where do you
suppose she got to so quick "if she was disoriented?" He said, "I don't know,
maybe she hid herself." And I said, "Why would she hide herself?" He said, "I have no idea." I said, "Show me exactly
where you turned." He accompanied me, sat
in the passenger seat. We drove up to where it was. We went down to where he turned around, and as I turned into the
area that he said he turned, it was a roadway that led
behind the apartment building. As I turned into this parking area, he said, "I turned right here," and I drove on down over the hill. He put both feet on the floor very hard, and both hands on the dash and said, "I've never been down in here, "I don't know where this goes." (ominous music) It was serious concern in his voice at that point when he said it. Following that, we left
and came back around to where we could look into
the compound from a park bench. And we sat there for a few minutes, and I told him that I believed the theory that the police had
was totally inaccurate, and that he knew a lot more
than he was letting on, and I said I could tell something was weighing heavy on his chest. He sat there quiet for a moment. And then he said, "There is something." (ominous music) I said, "And what is that?" And I let him talk, he
said, "I ripped her off. "I stole from her that night." And I said, "You stole from Holly?" And he said, "Yes." So I said, now you took
a normal fare home. Now you see a girl trip and fall, following the story you told police. Then, you now have stolen from her. I said, that's interesting. I said, what else happened? He said, "That's it." - There's one more piece of the puzzle that I can't make sense of. Some of Holly's belongings were found in the
parking lot of her condo, including her wallet, which was empty. How did those items get up there when she was found under the bridge? (ominous music) After reviewing the case,
and conducting interviews, Tom Martin has finished his investigation, and he's ready to share with us now what he believes took place on the night of Friday, March 26 2010. - This is not fact. This is the result of
reviewing the evidence that we have available to us, putting it all together based on the balance of probabilities. - It's always heavy to
go back to those days when you're sort of
reenacting it in your head. - I want to know exactly
what took place that night. - We know the cab came up to this area. There's a high probability
he pulled out in this area. It's out of the way, it's quiet, he stops. I believe there's a very low probability that Holly Bartlett was ever driven to the front door of her residence. Holly was in tune enough
that she would've known that this cab, if it did take
this right turn, took it. She would know, we should've turned left. And I think they engaged
in a conversation, a heated conversation. That conversation
escalated into an argument. - If there was a
confrontation of some kind, then she would have reacted
not too kindly to that. - And at some point, some items
fell out of Holly's purse, and I think the cane landed
on the floor of the cab. - Tom believes, after an
altercation of some kind took place, Holly either
raced out of the cab, or was forced out. - What's the first thing
Holly's gonna hear? - The bridge traffic. - It's as obvious as
the nose on your face. Holly following her sound cues, which is how she's trained, correct Peter? - Right. - She knows if she keeps that on her right, she's heading home. - Before, none of it made any sense to me. It makes more sense that Holly would be keeping the bridge on her right, knowing that that was the way home. - She's in a panic. Holly does not have her cane. She's gonna come to a wall that sticks out in that building. To go around it, she would have to walk towards the bridge traffic, and then make a lefthand turn through a very narrow passageway. At this point, anywhere
between here, and that wall, I believe is where Holly
went down over this edge. (somber music) She could've made contact
with any number of rocks, or trees, or stumps, or
anything else that was there. She has some very serious
injuries at this point. We have Holly at the fence now. Conscious, semi-conscious,
dazed, who knows? So she would've had to
move along the fence line. Course of doing so, would have
came across that one opening that was between the ground
and the bottom of the fence. She made her way into
that fenced in compound. She made her way over as far as the front of that far abutment, and I think that's where she laid down. And I think the point where she went down was where she was
recovered the next morning. When Holly was found, she
did not have her wallet, she did not have her cellphone, she did not have her
money, or her credit cards. Most importantly, she
didn't have her cane. The cane being found the following day, in a spot that was searched by a multitude of police
officers, twice by a K9 unit, and yet all of a sudden now
it's back into the scene. - Now somebody else had done the work, and figured out who Holly was. And knew that in their heart of hearts, it could never have happened
the way that we were told. (emotional music) - It made me feel that I wasn't crazy to think that something
different had happened than what the original theory was. And to confirm that my sister
wasn't this drunk idiot who didn't take care of herself, because it's about
defending her honor, too. - As a family, we will never,
ever forget what happened. - You're never gonna get peace with it, but at least someone looked at it and gave Holly the dignity
to look into further what really, truly happened. - I would really like for
the cause of Holly's death to be ruled suspicious,
as opposed to accidental. I would really like for the police department to
reopen this case based on that. I don't know if I'll ever
get that wish, but we'll see. (somber music)
