Forensics Vs Criminals | TRIPLE EPISODE | The New Detectives

[Music] in the Arizona desert a detective needs to link a murderer to a crime scene the only Witnesses are two bean pods a grotesque murder on a quiet beach has police baffled a forensic geologist hopes to transform a spoonful of sand into a witness for the prosecution [Music] after years of hunting for a clandestine grave the only thing binding a killer to his victim is a tree roote in the past rural Landscapes have offered Safe Haven to murderers hoping to keep their crimes concealed now thanks to the burgeoning fields of forensic botany and geology the killer who puts his faith in Nature's silence SWS his own seeds of [Music] Destruction the Sonoran Desert how many lives have been brutally ended in desolate Landscapes like this one with only an audience of trees to Bear witness today those unlikely observers are gaining a voice with which to expose the guilty the caterpillar Proving Grounds outside of Phoenix Arizona was a thrilling diversion for a man heading home one Sunday in May 1992 cutting through a dry wash he was struck by something out of place in the Raw [Applause] landscape he moved in for a closer [Applause] [Music] look face down beneath a canopy of poie trees lay the nude body of a woman she wasn't [Music] [Applause] breathing officers from the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department arrived at the scene from the condition of the body it appeared the victim had been murdered within the last 12 hours her clothing was scattered nearby braided wire and shoelaces were wrapped around her wrists and ankles it seemed the killer had spent some time with the victim before leaving her [Music] here detective Charlie Norton led the [Music] investigation the victim was identified by her fingerprints as 30-year-old Denise Johnson she'd been arrested for prostitution hours passed as the team poured over the crime scene they hoped to weave tatters of evidence into the coherent Narrative of a homicide she had a white T-shirt U just an undershirt was wrapped around her her neck and it looked like maybe she had been strangled as the team examined the torn clothes for Clues a fundamental piece of the puzzle came like a plea from Beyond the Grave is that the insistent beeping from a pager broke the Silence of the desert was some friend unaware of Johnson's fate trying to reach her or was this the Forgotten property of a careless killer a court order was obtained and the pager company contacted the owner of the pager was traced through its ID number the pager subscriber was a fellow by the name of Earl Bogan and when he said that his son Mark had exclusive use of the pager because he didn't have any telephone communication and basically that was the only way that the family had to get in touch with Mark while police processed the crime scene a man came forward with a statement can I help you at 1:30 the previous morning he noticed something odd a white pickup truck with Amber clearance lights whipping out of The Proving Grounds the driver ran a stop sign then flew toward the interstate combined with the pager information this eyewitness testimony would give Norton a leg up on the investigation when Norton learned that Mark Bogan owned a white pickup truck with Amber clearance lights it seemed to him he found the killer he would now have to prove [Music] it down this hallway Bogan accompanied by his wife Rebecca agreed to be interviewed at the sheriff's [Music] department I talk to her I I'll talk to him I asked was all in an interview with police recreated here Rebecca said that on the night of the murder Mark came home at 2 a.m. his face bloodied and scratched he told Rebecca he'd been in a bar brawl but Bogan told police a different story he claimed he' picked up a hitchhiker who fit Denise Johnson's description and had sex with her in his truck Bogan admitted lying to his wife because he knew she'd be disgusted with the truth the story was coming together a bit too neatly for Norton and he wondered whether ban was twisting the fact to fit the evidence and and I think somebody made contact with him and uh told him that the Sheriff's Office investigators were looking for him so I think that kind of basically tipped him off and uh he came up with this story according to Bogan after their encounter he and the hitchhiker argued he ordered her out of the truck and as she left she swiped his wallet and pager Bogan chased her and fought to recover the wallet he claimed to have left Johnson on the side of the interstate [Music] alive Norton suspected that Bogan was telling only half the story I suspect probably that what Mark told me when I interviewed him as far as picking her up uh having an argument and so forth like that I suspect all that's probably true but the part that he left out is where it happened and that he ended up killing her Norton believed that Bogan was a murderer but he wasn't getting any help from the suspect not only did Bogan adamantly deny killing Denise Johnson it had been years he claimed since he'd even stepped foot in the caterpillar Proving Grounds Ban's admission that he had spent the evening with Denise Johnson would ironically make it more difficult to prove that he had killed her terrible we got nothing on this guy every everything that he's told us shuts down all of our our our whole case he had sex with her he knows who she is the whole shooting match Ban's story spotty as it was had just defused an arsenal of forensic Weaponry DNA analysis of body fluids or fingernail scrapings could only prove something which Bogan had already admitted on the evening of May 2nd 1992 he and Denise Johnson had sex then fought Norton's Only Hope of bringing Bogan to Justice would be to link him to the scene of the crime a little patch of grass under a cluster of Po birie trees in The Proving Grounds Ban's truck was seized and searched but nothing linking Bogan to Johnson's death was found two seemingly unexceptional poie seed pods were collected from the truck bed but thousands of these trees grow in Southern Arizona the pods could have come from anywhere it hardly seemed like the kind of evidence that could tie a man to a murder struggling for a way to link Bogen to the crime scene detective Norton returned to the Proving Grounds then inspiration struck noticing Apollo verie tree with a fresh scrape on it he theorized that after dumping Johnson's body Ban's truck had brushed this tree causing the pods to flutter free and land in his truck bed if DNA testing could prove that the pods in Ban's truck matched the scarred tree Norton and his colleagues would be able to dismantle Ban's Alibi but there was a problem the test they invisioned had never been done before to catch a killer detective Norton approached Timothy Helen Jaris associate professor of molecular genetics at the University of Arizona Norton wanted to determine whether there was enough variability in po Verdi DNA to distinguish one tree from another when I was contacted by the sheriff's department they told me that there were they had some pods that were collected from the truck and they thought they might have matched one of the trees at the site um they did remark that one of the trees had scrape marks and so they had one particular Tree in mind so I asked them to collect pods from all the trees around the sites but not to tell me which one was marked and just to number them so it would be a blind study using a Cutting Edge technique called Rapids for randomly Amplified polymorphic DNA Helen jarus rendered genetic profiles of sample trees and pods the results were surprising poie DNA appeared to be as complex as the human code it seemed that individual trees could be easily distinguished from one another Dr Helen Jaris first confirmed that the pods from Ban's truck were from the same tree he then compared that profile with DNA profiles from a lineup of 11 trees at the crime scene when we then informed the sheriff's department of which numbered tree it was it turned out to be the one that in fact had the scrape marks on it that they were suspicious of to start with so we felt pretty confident with our result there The Noose was tightening around Mark Ban's neck he was arrested and a court date set armed with Helen Jar's findings the prosecution was eager to confront the defendant with the silent testimony of Apollo ver tree but Bogan wasn't going down without a fight to convict Mark Bogan of killing Denise Johnson the prosecution hung their case on the admissibility of Rapids a legally unproven procedure DNA analysis of humans had only been deemed admissible in Arizona courts a few months earlier using plant DNA to prove murder would be a stretch and yet the entire case hinged on it Ban's defense team hired its own expert expert Paul Kim of Northern Arizona University to refute Helen Jar's findings in a pre-trial hearing if Kim could cast doubt on the validity of Helen Jar's technique Bogan would likely walk out of court a free man so I think that the Bogan family hoped that my expert advice uh expert opinion on the new DNA fingerprinting method uh that was being employed here would say that this was not a valid approach to forensic uh science and that this was not conclusive evidence uh that their son had been at the crime scene heyim though he was brought into the case as a Hired Gun for the defense Dr Kim's loyalty was to science and the responsible use of Laboratory Testing his mistrust about Rapids was valid since its debut the new technique had been known to give false readings if the extremely careful controls aren't maintained throughout testing in my opinion it meant that we had to hold it up to a very high standard of scrutiny and so that we it was important that we understood everything that was done here and that it was done correctly when performed with extreme care Rapids provides researchers with an amazing new tool the ability to look at an organism's DNA without any prior information about about that species genetic composition the first step in the process is to get the DNA out of the pods the seeds must be removed for accurate testing each represents a mixture of the trees's genetic material with the pollen that fertilized it and would therefore introduce separate DNA into the test liquid nitrogen instantly freezes the Pod so that it can be easily pulverized once it has been purified the DNA is ready for PCR Gene amplification this heating process increases a minute sample of DNA to provide technicians with ample genetic material for testing when reconstituted with water the seed pod's DNA will be invisible to the eye but extremely revealing in other ways the poty sample is now ready to yield its genetic fingerprint in order to make that pattern visible a process called gel electroforesis is used blue dye is added to the DNA sample which is then inserted into the Lanes on a Jell-O like slab exposure to an electrical field causes the fragments in the DNA to separate the resulting barcode is then illuminated with UV light and photographed when hired by Ban's defense team Kim had been skeptical about Rapids ability to conclusively differentiate between Pao birdie trees but when he studied Dr Helen Jar's data and the painstaking process by which he collected it he was surprised at how definitive the results were influenced by his colleagues findings Kim was won over to the prosecution's side and under oath he couldn't refute the results in K's opinion the tree and the Pod matched to a great degree of certainty the defense team now faced an insurmountable setback by the researchers Fidelity to science Bogan was going down when I examined the uh scientific evidence the first thing that was most obvious to me was is that the DNA from the Pod that was found in Ban's truck did in fact have exactly the same DNA fingerprint pattern as one of the trees uh where the body was found Helen jarus and Kim had placed Mark Bogan at the crime scene after he had killed Denise Johnson Bogan backed his truck into a tree and shook loose the evidence that would later convict him the unrefuted genetic findings decimated the foundation of Ban's defense Bogan was convicted of murder and sent to prison for life Helen Jar's trailblazing research established Botanical DNA profiling as an effective forensic tool giving a voice to two tiny seed pods without whose testimony a murderer would still be walking Among Us a world away from the Arizona desert New England's Coastline can be as desolate a place to die as the barren Sonora landscape but like those seemingly inconsequential poti pods grains of sand can be made to talk on the morning of June 30th 1994 a woman and her two nephews roamed Crescent Beach in Rhode Island buried treasure was the children's goal mom um what they found instead seemed to have been buried [Music] alive detective Arthur Clark of the East Providence Police Department was called to investigate the buried woman at the beach the scene was more reminiscent of a Steven King novel than anything the veteran detective had seen in person 2T beneath the surface lay a woman in a red satin cocktail dress her life had been ended by multiple blows to the Head we arrived on the scene about 10:15 uh we verified they were human arms it appeared a body was buried in a shallow grave uh we notified the medical examiner's office who responded the victim's arms jutted out from beneath the sand her hands clawing Skyward in what seemed a final grasp for life it seemed unlikely that she'd been buried alive the medical examiner concluded that in her condition the victim wouldn't have the strength to push her hands up through the sand someone had posed her into this VY gesture like a scene from a horror film The Killer seemed to be leaving a calling card but his message was inscrutable a circular pattern had been pressed into the sand around the body in it lay a shattered watch face its hands Frozen at midnight but for detectives time raced forward it seemed that some sort of grotesque ritual was performed here they feared it could be the beginning of killings to come they needed to work quickly before this killer struck again at this early stage of Investigation vital Clues might be masquerading as common trash cigarette butts candy wrappers and plastic cups were collected from the scene along with samples of sand from both the surface and the bottom of the grave at the time uh we didn't know what was evidence and what was not so on the side of caution we collected what we thought could could end up being evidence once we put the tape out there's been nobody else in the area but before Clark could make sense of the Eerie spectacle he'd have to learn more about the victim he didn't have to look far at around 8:00 uh that evening a gentleman uh by the name of Christopher hutter who lived in Pucket Rhode Island called the Pucket police to report his wife missing the missing woman was 30-year-old Kendra hutter from a photograph Clark recognized her as the murder victim according to her husband Kendra and he had lived more like roommates than lovers beyond the facade of domestic contentment dwelt a Loveless marriage bound together by Financial need and parental obligation they agreed to date other people Christopher hutter told police police that Kendra had a date the night she died I'm going out police later learned she met him through a personal ad the divorced white male described himself as a cheerful attractive father hoping to add a dash of romance to her life she contacted him and they arranged for a date on the night of June 29th Kendra scribbled the man's name and phone number for her husband the card read Gary detective Clark identified Gary as Gary ton a truck driver who lived with his mother and brother in Cumberland he told police that he'd had three dates with Kendra hutter but denied having been with her on the night of her murder the personable tasson did his best to help Clark telling police that he knew Kendra and her husband were having marital trouble he suggested that perhaps the disgruntled Christopher hutter was the murder when ton told Clark he'd been to the beach where the body was found Clark asked him to come to the station to continue questioning spit blood after taking his first statement uh there were several things that didn't Jive there were some inconsistencies in what he told us and what we had learned up until then in an interview with police recreated here tone adamant denied having been with Kendra hutter the night of the murder the second part of that as the interview wore on however he revised his story he admitted he'd been on a date with her that night but dropped her off around 11:00 but that contradicted what Kendra's husband reported according to him Kendra never made it home that night as far as they could tell tasson was the last person to see the victim alive the detectives pressed on detective Bido and I spoke to him uh on and off for about four hours that evening uh he never displayed any signs of emotion he uh he didn't uh he spoke very well he was articulate polite cool calm he was uh not nervous at all pretty just matter of fact Clark continued to question tessone and as the interview moved into its fifth grueling hour tone finally offered up an account he and Kendra had been building sand castles when a noise startled him causing him to inadvertently strike her in the head in a panic he buried the body in the sand considering the extent of Kendra hutter's injuries seven strikes to the Head Clark rejected the story there was no question in the detective's mind that the victim was killed [Music] intentionally what is it what's wrong we don't know why she was murdered but uh it was no accident on the surface it seemed that tone was beginning to cooperate but his statement made no sense and Clark didn't know what to make of it the tale he told of accidental death was far-fetched and implausible but probably reflected a skewed version of what really happened from what Clark had already learned of the case tone was sprinkling his narrative with blatant lies the resulting story was more confusion than confession if only Clark could sift through the fantasy and get to the truth he'd have the case sewn [Music] up for now Clark had to follow along and see where tone would take him under the guise of cooperation the suspect LED police to a roadside embankment where he said he ditched the shovel it seemed like just another delay tactic but a shovel did indeed turn up [Music] with this discovery the evidence seemed to be stacked on Clark's side he had a murder victim buried in a ritualistic fashion he had the alleged murder weapon he had a suspect who could link the two together but Clark only had Ton's unlikely story to place him at the crime scene to make the charges stick he needed to construct a more coherent account of what happened armed with a warrant police searched Ton's car the findings were slim amounting to little more than a scattering of sand it seemed Clark had found all the evidence there was to find it was time to go to court but at the start of the criminal trial in January 1997 tone began to backpedal claiming to have been coerced into confession in exchange for immunity tone recanted his story and explained away the sand in his trunk as having come from an evening with another woman at the beach the shovel he said was just a shovel police couldn't disprove it suddenly detective Clark found the tide was turning against him without Gary Ton's confession detective Clark and the Rhode Island police had to treat the case as if they'd never had a confession at all to link tone to the crime scene Clark needed solid evidence but all he had was a handful of sand Clark knew the answer was written here but he wasn't able to read it to build a case on such unusual evidence was beyond the resources of his small small Department he had to call in the experts he sent the physical evidence to the FBI's forensic geology lab the only one of its kind in the country there geologist Bruce Hall examined the shovel the blanket debris from the crime scene and the sand recovered from tassone's vehicle the contributor East Providence Rhode Island asked that we compare any soil or sand recovered from any of those items with some known samples of sand that they had recovered from the crime scene in the situation it was a beach to see the past in a grain of sand that is Hall's Mission each grain is a world unto itself differing not only across continents but across the length and breadth of a shoreline as well every child knows that sand on the surface of a beach is different from Sand below but what few criminals realized is that these differences can be measured and compared we have known soil samples from the grave we have some because it is a grave we're dealing in three dimensions we have some that were taken a number of different locations on the surface of the Earth as now we have a a profile if you will we've got a hole in the ground that may be 1 2 3ot deep we have a number of samples now from various depths if the grains of sand found in the suspect's car came from the bottom of the excavated grave rather than than the beach surface as tessone claimed Hall would soon find out to catch tessone Hall concentrated on the sand samples taken from the bottom of the victim's grave if sand on any of Tone's possessions matched it Clark would have his case geologic examination takes a three-pronged approach samples are compared according to color texture and composition the analysis begins with a careful look at color this first test requires no sophisticated equipment but it's essential for ruling out samples that would have no bearing on Tone's case would view these under a number of different lighting conditions uh daylight again fluorescent light uh incandescent light and compare their color the soil representing uh soil recovery from the shovel dissimilar to that uh collected from the beach each the blanket again at arms length we can see there's a color difference this soil did not originate from the same source as the known soil however when we take a look at the soil from a vehicle they're strikingly similar with respect to color the color comparison demonstrated that judging from the sand grain evidence the shovel may not have been involved in the crime or tone may have used it elsewhere before ditching it it seemed like just another red herring tone throughout to get police office sent tone won that battle but not the war the sand from his car matched the color of the sand collected from the bottom of the Grave Paul moved on to phase two with this sample analyzing texture the sand is rinsed with water and exposed to ultrasonic waves which vibrate off any silk or clay clinging to the sample the sample is dried and placed under a stereo microscope now Hall looks at the size and texture of the grains a well sorted sample consists of same sized grains like table salt whereas a poorly sorted sample contains a variety of sizes like a can of mixed nuts hul also looks at the shapes of the individual grains are they round angular or oval for example in the sand from Tone's car the grains were mixed consistently the sample was said to be well sorted and made up of well-rounded grains so was the sample taken from the bottom of the Grave the walls were closing in on Gary tone but Hall still had one more test to perform he examined the soil samples under a polarized light microscope to determine their mineral composition different minerals have different Optical properties when exposed to polarized light these characteristics enable Hall to identify them characterizing minerals is fundamentally no different than characterizing an individual how tall is that individual how much do they weigh what is their hair color eye color and you characterize a mineral in the in the same fashion the sample from Tone's trunk was composed predominantly of quartz with a small amount of the mineral Feld Spar when he looked at the sand from the bottom of Kendra hutter's grave under the same conditions he found the samples matched Bruce Hall had now proven that Gary tone was in fact with Kendra hutter on the beach the night she died and more than that he proved that tone buried her body based largely on the strength of Bruce Hall's forensic evidence the jury found Gary tone guilty of first-degree murder he is serving a life sentence without parole the strange man had lured a woman from the personal ads beaten her in the head with a shovel almost 20 times and buried her in a way sure to be noticed the motive and meaning of his crime remain a mystery also unknown is whether this was the first strike of Gary tone as he drove his truck across the country did he Place ads in other papers luring unsuspecting women like Kendra hutter to their deaths or was his first victim also his last though the grave markers may be erased by time nature doesn't forget death the world is forever changed for the family of a murder victim the same holds true for the landscape in which a body is buried 20-year-old Sher Elder was known around the Denver suburb of Lakewood Colorado as having a mind of her own it didn't make for smooth relationships on the evening of March 27th 1993 she had a skirmish with her boyfriend Byron Powers no doubt apologies follow after a few hours of downtime [Music] to blow off some steam Sher caught a ride to Central City a seedy gambling Town 1 hour's drive into the Rockies her escort an older man was good company and her moodiness lifted as the Night War on at 1:40 the next morning Sher and her companion left the casino she would soon join the ranks of the missing days passed with no sign of share her frantic father reported her missing to the Lakewood Police Department detective Scott Richardson was assigned to the case missing person cases are a tricky call Richardson didn't want to throw his Department's resources behind a massive search only to find that the time and energy had been misspent on a girl who'd left town to cool off it's a tough investigation how how involved do you want to get on a missing person case and how complex do you want to make a missing person case to find out they're laying out on the beach in Maui somewhere Richardson had a bad feeling however that Sher wasn't on vacation his first objective was to identify the man with whom she'd last been seen a Sur surveillance camera at the casino had captured His Image we did not know who that male was and that was the last time she was seen alive a friend of hers had seen her in the casino with this male the man was identified as Thomas Luther an acquaintance of sher's boyfriend Byron Powers Sher had been introduced to the older man shortly before her unlucky gambling trip to Central City the more he learned about Thomas Luther the more Richardson sensed that he was no longer looking for a missing person he was now looking for a body in Thomas Luther Sher had picked the wrong shoulder to cry on a known sex offender Luther was fresh off a 10-year prison sentence for attacking and raping a young woman he had bragged in jail that when he got out the police wouldn't find the next woman he killed this time he'd be sure to bury the body where it would never be found Richardson set out to foil that plan our focus of the case at that time was to try to find the body of Sher Elder for two reasons we needed it for prosecution and the family Richardson questioned Luther who claimed that after leaving the casino he dropped Elder off at her boyfriend's house Luther's car was seized seed and searched for evidence but nothing suggesting murder was found for weeks Richardson pressed on though he had very little hard evidence knowing that this girl's body was out there somewhere kept the detective searching to outsmart a clever criminal like Luther Richardson would need to raise the suspect's level of uneasiness hopefully compelling him back to the grave site for a cautious once over the prior day I called Luther up at home and intentionally meant to sound really confident I told him hey we got some evidence and I want you here at 9:00 tomorrow morning hoping that it would increase his anxiety and he would make a mistake Richardson succeeded in Flushing his Quarry out of the brush an informant told him that Luther planned to return to the Grave early the following morning if the body had been dug up he planned to flee the state immediately meanwhile undercover officers cast a wide net over the Metropolitan Denver area tailing Luther's acquaintances and scouting major roads the morning of his meeting with Richardson police observed a man in a car parked beside the road soon police saw saw Luther emerge from the woods and get into the [Music] car he proceeded to his meeting with Richardson cocky with the knowledge that his pursuer was [Music] bluffing without a body Richardson couldn't hold Luther he was bound by law to release him and his car months passed without any progress on the case meantime the prime suspect moved out of state with each passing day the more likely it seemed that share Elder's demise would forever remain a secret between the Killer and the victim the only thing keeping Richardson going was the faith that Sher Elder was buried somewhere in Empire Valley but finding her in the craggy lowland would be an arduous task this Valley is about 15 miles in length and as you get out here when you start looking for a possible location of the Grave it's nothing but Rock slides and piles of rocks and there's so many potential areas that uh a body could be hidden in that it just became a aaz weeks of foraging around Empire Valley left detectives empty-handed and frustrated finding Sher Elder's body in this rough terrain required a kind of expertise that would tax the resources of almost any Police Department was any good yes hopefully we aware that he'd reached his Department's limits detective Richardson was running out of options but he wasn't quite ready to throw in the towel the Relentless detective had one final inspiration he contacted necro search an elite Corp of scientists that uses a wide range of disciplines to locate clandestine Graves necro search exists because a group of law enforcement officers and and scientists got together and figured there had to be a better way to find murdered or buried people and evidence go ahead towards that goal necro search has assembled leading scientists from all over Colorado comprising 15 Specialties including geology geophysics forensic anthropology and entomology 53972 the fundamental premise of necrarch is that buried bodies change the ecosystem around them forever the soil above a grave May sag under rain or snow specific vegetation May flourish on the decomposing body 53969 insects and scavengers arrive this is a case of a of a lifetime uh this took everything that we had everything that we could use of other sources from other agencies that's why necr search was requested to come in and assist it was real simple we're a large largely populated Community here we're in the metro Denver area um we don't have expertise in going out looking for Graves uh we don't have very many graves dug in the city so far the all volunteer necro search team has participated in over 100 cases in 30 States and seven countries the group convenes monthly to review potential cases for most petitioners like detective Richardson necro search represents a final glimmer of hope I was asked by necrarch to come to their meeting and present the case to see if it was something that necr search could assist me and so the case presentation was made to necr search at that time and uh boy they asked me questions that I'd never thought of such as what color was what color was the dirt on Luther's pants when he came to get his car cuz that may indicate he crawled out of a m Shaft or he may have been in a sand pit and uh it was it was pretty apparent right then that when I contacted necro search these are the people that can help me cuz they have the experience in trying to locate a grave the rocky terrain hampered the Endeavor making disturbances in the soil difficult to spot the team probed the Earth for Clues undetectable to the human eye on the geology side we're looking for disturbances in the layering and everything is layered you wouldn't think so but you come out here you dig down a few feet you'll find various layers within the rock so or within the soil and we're looking where to see where that's been Disturbed ground sweeps aerial searches and infrared analysis ruled out many potential grave sites but still as the months passed no body was found it seemed like Thomas Luther's boast about outsmarting police was coming true in late J anuary of 1995 a tip LED detective Richardson and necr search to a steep piny slope off the highway rocks covered most of the area a grave could be disguised anywhere necrarch did some preliminary testing of the location but were shut down because of weather it was now nearly 2 years after sher's disappearance you don't like me and I don't like you then a crucial break came Byron Powers sher's boyfriend landed in prison for assault it seemed Sher had a fatal lapse of judgment in her choice of companions in an effort to lessen the charges against him Powers dangled a piece of information in front of the police he said he knew that Luther had killed Sher Elder and he knew where he' buried her body poers had been there about 3 weeks after shar's death to help Luther better conceal the [Music] [Music] grave Powers directed Richardson right past pass the point where the necr search team had given up unlike most Killers who hastily dump bodies down hill Luther had taken his time in selecting a grave that would seem an improbable choice to police what we ultimately learned is that Thomas Luther carried the body of Sher Elder straight up a hillside by a rock slide and went uphill which is uncommon [Music] the pile of rocks that powers pointed out was less than a foot from the place that Richardson and necrarch had been testing shortly before the weather had forced them to quit we were 2 in from the body of Sher Elder when we quit digging the first time we went back excavated to remove the body of Sher Elder as if setting up an archaeological excavation the team established a grid and embarked upon an oldstyle dig laboriously the team scraped soil 10 cm at a time archaeologist Steve irand was part of the search for share Elders remains there the uh initial 2 or 3 in of ground uh was frozen it was what uh January or February as I recall and uh so there had to use a pick in order to U get that top a couple of inches which is frozen off after 4 days and 2 ft of digging the team reached bone excavated with fine hand tools like whisk brooms toothbrushes and bamboo sticks the remains of a body finally took shape in the Frozen soil dental records would identify the body as Sher Elder preliminary autopsy results showed that the young woman had been shot in the head three times execution style this discovery might have been enough evidence to convince a jury that Luther had killed Elder but prosecutors would have a much better chance if they knew the time of death if the body had been buried at least two years ago a time when Sher was known to have been with Luther the charge of murder would be much easier to prove in court the team's careful excavation uncovered a clump of plant roots growing into the victim's soft flesh necrarch called in botanist Vicky traml to extract and preserve them could she determine the time of burial from this Botanical evidence when digging is done and roots are cut this stimulates growth of new Roots into the fresh backfill dirt so the idea was that these roots ought to be about the same general age as the grave in order to determine the age of the new growth The Roots were sent to a lab where they were cut crosswise and stained highlighting the characteristics of the cells most Woody species of trees like the pines and Furs that forested the area near the victim grave form their roots in the same way and the new Roots have a particular pattern of cells that can be recognized under the microscope most of the differences involve the xylm which is the water conducting tissue in the plant and what I'm seeing is uh the Water conducting tissue kind of in a triangle and the it's the triangle shape that tells me that that is a very young route about a firste route another Year's growth sees a significant change in the cells the triangle of tissue gives way to larger water conducting cells this tells me it's a secondary route from their cellular structure traml estimated the roots to be 2 years old her findings sealed the case against Thomas Luther proving the grave was dug at a time after he was released from jail and known to be with the victim in the end a jury was convinced that Thomas Luther killed Sher Elder he was sentenced to 48 years in prison with no chance of parole thanks to the tireless pursuit of Scott Richardson and the cuttingedge forensics of the necr search team The Odyssey had finally come to an end I myself don't believe in what they call closure I believe if you lose a loved one that you will feel that loss for the rest of your life life but at least if they know what happened they possibly can get on with their life in some way after the case ended necr search paid detective Richardson the ultimate honor and inducted him into their selective ranks without his determination Sher Elder would still be hidden in a desolate grave the Earth is an impartial eyewitness to murder but forensic botany and geology are finding ways to gather its testimony crimes considered unsolvable a few years earlier are now being won on the basis of Roots Seeds and sand the landscape has become grounds for conviction but we've only begun to scratch the surface a car bomb hurls investigators down a dark and twisted path at the end is one woman with many deadly Secrets a bustling emergency room is brought to its knees with the arrival of a Dying woman scientists try to determine what might have turned her blood to toxic gas a Florida family is mysteriously sickened the mother suffers a lingering death before police can catch the killer they must first find the source of the poison the most subtle of killers is absolutely silent working from the inside out to turn its victim's body against itself when chemistry goes wrong scientists struggle to determine what constitutes a lethal dosage [Music] June 28th 1983 began as a night of Celebration Judy buenoano met her boyfriend John Gentry and the women who worked at her beauty salon at a Pensacola Florida restaurant they gathered to present one of the employees with a pendant in honor of her birthday as the dinner was finished and the party wore down Judy suggested that John go to the liquor store for some champagne so they could continue celebrating elsewhere as night fell the streets grew quiet but the silence would be shattered in an [Music] instant police and rescue raced to the scene Gentry was rushed to the hospital Shel embedded in his back at first investigators weren't sure if the explosion was due to Mechanical failure or an attempt on Gentry's life but even a cursory look at the crime scene revealed the blast to be no accident it came from the trunk an unlikely place for an explosion of that magnitude because bombings are a federal offense Pensacola Police notified the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms by the extent of the last ATF agents estimated two sticks of dynamite were used rigged to the tail lights by yellow and orange wire Gentry was lucky to have escaped with his life as the ATF investigated the scene and the crime photos Pensacola Police sought to find out who would benefit from Gentry's death that task fell to detective Ted Chamberlain what we usually do is we look into insurance policies of the victim and that's what we did with Gentry and we looked into we found he did have a large insurance policy on him the beneficiary was Judy buenoano Gentry's girlfriend but that wasn't surprising the two were starting a business together by itself the information meant nothing Chamberlain needed more to go on invation the ATF found it they traced the dynamite to a man in Alabama a very close friend of Judy buenoano going by now Gentry was out of intensive care detectives took the opportunity to talk to him about what happened to let him know that Judy buenoano was the main suspect against you that Gentry found it difficult to believe but then he began thinking about it the relationship he said you know uh when I'm staying over there at Judy's house I get she was giving me these pills uh vitamins to make me feel better he said I kept getting sick he said so I quit taking them and then I felt better he said and I took them again and got sick again Gentry had been so ill he'd spent time in the hospital there he recovered completely though his doctor wasn't sure what was wrong with him once Gentry returned home he relapsed have your pills for you right finally he stopped taking the vitamin pills and his health returned he felt his days of illness were behind him and then his car blew up sensing a connection the detective asked Gentry if he'd saved any of the capsules you have a bus partner as a matter of fact he had they were supposedly a popular vitamin C supplement were Chamberlain sent them to the lab for analysis my wife's finding out what something isn't is easier than finding out what it is the process of elimination began with a comparison of the capsules with vitamin C it proved there was not a speck of the vitamin in the capsules that Discovery alone ramped up the suspicion that the pills were poisoned but what was in them the substance in the capsules was dissolved and tested some tests analyzed its chemical makeup others measured the wavelengths of light it absorbed by comparing these results with a database of chemicals the compound was identified the capsules were found to contain a substance called parap formalde it has no known medical use in fact it's considered a class 3 poison which means it's moderately toxic John trestrail of the blet Poison Control Center is a poisoning expert according to him if murder was the motive paraph formaldahyde wasn't the best choice when it breaks down to falahi which we know is used to preserve bodies uh is very irritating it wouldn't be a very good poison to pick for homicidal reasons be more irritating you know irritating to the eyes is irritating the respiratory tract and I suppose in chronic exposures we know from Malahide can cause cancer you Gentry Story bolstered by the tampered pills and the explosion gave Chamberlain ample grounds to obtain search warrants for Bueno ano's home and beauty salon at her house they found more vitamin capsules com right I'll check the Clos something like that basket oh I got something in her son's closet they found wire that resembled the wire used to blow up the car got a wire here my gloves so we sent that off to the lab and they sent us back pictures of the wire and the color coding and striations of the wire Tak one taken from the piece of the bomb that was gone and the one from the boy's room and you put them together it was just like matching up ballistics on bullets I mean they looked exactly alike and that was real good evidence hi I'm detective Robert Beasley this is an offal investigation while one group of officers searched the house another group was at work collecting chemicals from Bueno ano's salon [Music] I'm not sure either for Judy buenoano parap Malahide would be a poison of opportunity it the chemical is used in beauty salons as a disinfectant with evidence of the bomb and the poison police had ample grounds to arrest her on suspicion y the bombing made her a suspect in a federal crime the atf's jurisdiction stretched Beyond Florida to all 50 states having failed at both poisoning and blowing up her lover buenoano seemed like a two-time loser but as investigators checked her background they began to suspect that she may have just been in a slump as news of Judy Bueno ano's arrest spread detective Chamberlain received a call from the mother of one of her ex-boyfriends in Alabama a man named Bobby Joe Morris a man who had died mysteriously her son and Judy lived together and she had a very strong suspicion that he didn't die of natural causes that she had poisoned or killed her son buenoano had pressured Bobby Joe's mother to cremate the body but she refused Chamberlain promised he'd look into the matter everybody that we talked to they all seem to be a little bit scared of Judy a little bit afraid of her that she uh she would always make up these incredible stories is what we were hearing from her and uh we even talked to one witness that uh the witness said that uh she uh Judy had told this girl said look if you don't like your husband poison him with stories of Bobby Joe Morris and others coming to light police began to suspect that John Gentry wasn't way ano's first victim they found that her life at least on the surface appeared touched by tragedy but her closer inspection suggested something more [Music] diabolical Judy lost her husband James Goodyear in 1971 3 months after he returned from Vietnam he lapsed into delirium and died what a great day for stay after his death Judy changed her name from Judy Goodyear to Judy buenoano the Spanish translation of her husband's surname the deeper Chamberlain dug the darker Judy's past became bodies were beginning to Tumble out of her closet you'd open up one door and go in it and and it would lead to you about five or six more doors that was the problem with her you know would just it didn't it didn't look like it was ever going to stop you know we kept finding bodies everywhere one of those bodies was her own son Michael Goodyear he joined the army in 1979 shortly after visiting his mother while on leave he became ill tests showed exposure to arsenic because his job involved working with the substance it was assumed that he'd inadvertently ingested some he soon began to lose the use of his arms and legs and he was discharged his first day home Judy and her youngest son took Michael on a canoe trip near their home despite the fact that Michael wore heavy braces he had no life jacket okay let's see in the middle of the lake the boat capsized and Michael drowned okay back then it seemed like a tragic if stupid accident but now Chamberlain wasn't so certain okay too many men in Judy Bueno ano's life had come to an untimely end watch it a Sinister pattern was taking shape while Judy awaited her day in court for the attempted murder of John Gentry Chamberlin gathered evidence of homicide she may have gotten away with at least so far he learned that Judy's husband James Goodyear showed symptoms consistent with any number of illnesses among them our IC poisoning if he was poisoned the evidence was buried with him 12 years after his death his body was ordered accumed to look for proof and when you exume a body looking for one of the heavy metals like lead thallium arsenic animony these are all elements elements have been around since the solar system was created they're just as detectable today as they were 250 million years ago and 250 million years down the road from now so when you talk about digging up a body looking for arsenic if it was in that body when it went in the ground it's going to be in that body until it degrades Goodyear had been autopsied at the time of his death but the medical examiner wasn't looking for poison so he didn't find any almost anything can be poison poisonous if enough is swallowed so no single test can be used to detect all poisons the analyst must be guided by his knowledge of the symptoms so he can narrow the field and test for specific poisons arsenic tends to concentrate in the heart liver lungs and kidneys samples of each were tested for the toxin AR can take down a person in an hour or a year depending on how much he ingests a single large dose kills quicker than small doses over a longer time a faster death means the poison would have less time to damage organs good years's lingering death suggested cumulative long-term poisoning the ravaged condition of his organs bore that out the diagnosis was crucial and incriminating because it made accidental poisoning less likely since James and Judy goodar lived in the same house it seemed reasonable that they'd both be exposed to arsenic if the hazard were present but Judy never showed any symptoms next the medical examiner set out to determine how much arsenic was present in Goodyear system the victim's hair and nails provided a handy yard stick a complete fingernail was removed from the nail bed and dissolved in acid the resulting solution was put in an instrument called an atomic absorption spectrometer that determines the concentration of arsenic in the sample the amount of arsenic a person swallows is proportional to the amount in the victim's hair and nails the medical examiner could tell that the levels were too high to have come from the environment and since hair grows at a set rate he could use it to see how long Goodyear had been given the poison he determined that the contaminated portion of the hair was consistent with 3 months growth James Goodyear had been home from the Navy 3 months before he died the evidence suggested that Judy had wasted no time doing away with her husband shortly after James Goody years's autopsy Judy's boyfriend and second suspected victim Bobby Joe Morris was exhumed his hair and nails contained enough arsonic to kill 11 men it appeared that over a 12-year period Judy buenoano managed to fatally poison Two Men and poison and drown a third other men in her life had also met mysterious ends but she was never prosecuted for their deaths the motive in every case was insurance money ironically it was the one who got away John Gentry that ultimately exposed her deadly game her botched attempt to poison him forced her to resort to using a bomb on the surface the choice may seem bizarre but to poison expert John trestrail the difference between bombs and poisons is only a matter of degree I uh personally believe there's a great similarity between the psychological profile of a bomber and a poisoner because what is a poison other than a chemical bomb it doesn't make any noise the effect is the same you blow up the victim poisoning is more subtle and May at first go undetected but there's no statute of limitations on murder and poison leaves its traces for a very long time one clue is all it takes to expose the truth and of course every poisoner looks for the perfect poison that's undetectable my answer is what would you call it if it's got a name don't you have to see something to name it and if you see it is it not detectable so there is no perfect non-detectable poison Judy buenoano received 12 years for bombing Gentry's car life in prison for the drowning death of her son and is on death row for poisoning her husband for the death of Bobby Joe Morris there was simply no punishment left to give her she is one of only 48 women ever sentenced to death in the United States it took years for Bueno ano's methodical poisonings to catch up with her but once her villainy was revealed the evidence was irrefutable across the country scientists faced a more perplexing dilemma how could the body of a Dying woman poison the staff of an emergency room just after 8:00 p.m. on February 9th 1994 paramedics whisked 31-year-old Gloria Ramirez into the emergency room at California's Riverside Hospital her boyfriend called because she collapsed and had trouble breathing the paramedics related to the ER staff that the patient had cervical cancer but she hadn't yet begun chemotherapy in fact there was nothing in her record to prepare the ER for what was to come when Ramirez arrived at the emergency room she already had an oxygen mask on her face need nurse nurses we need then her heart rhythm began to fluctuate and the staff tried to shock it back to normal it wasn't [Music] working a nurse drew blood to run some tests for and that's when the well choreographed chaos of the emergency room began to Fall to Pieces Ramirez's body began to take on an oily Sheen the nurse drawing the blood complained of a strange [Music] odor she handed the hypodermic to a physician then she passed out the odor something like garlic or ammonia increased beige crystals were noticed in the blood sample suddenly another nurse fell many in short order another nurse became dizzy and went to the nurses station to rest there she lost Consciousness her arms and legs began to shake uncontrollably occasionally she'd stopped breathing then one of the doctors succumbed Ramirez was still not [Music] stabilized an emergency was declared as attendants rushed in to clear the collapsing staff and attend to Ramirez as the emergency room was evacuated gurns were wheeled into the parking lot unable to cope with the bizarre Onslaught Riverside sent its staff and patients to other hospitals the caregivers suddenly became the patience bedum ruled and at its Center lay a helpless dying woman within 15 minutes of contact with Gloria Ramirez 27 of the 37 staff members at Riverside Hospital suffered strange symptoms respiratory therapist Moren Welch was one of them after I awoke um outside was very sick uncontrollable Tremors nausea wretching um difficulty breathing um my vision felt kind of limited at that time I could only see things close to me okay it's okay it's okay there was simply no explaining what could have caused the symptoms okay many of those affected recovered quickly others spent weeks in the hospital within 35 minutes of Ram's arrival at the hospital she was pronounced dead the crisis had passed but the mystery deepened 35 her body was sealed in two plastic bags and an airtight casket before being moved to the hospital morg to find the cause of the catastrophe the Riverside hazardous materials or HazMat team arrived suited for battle duct work sewage lines plumbing and waste disposal were thoroughly checked the air in the emergency room was a electronically sniffed for toxic gases solvents or chemicals nothing was overlooked and nothing could explain what happened on the sink put them in The Biohazard bag once the emergency room was given a clean bill of he suspicions turned to the patient an autopsy revealed nothing extraordinary Gloria Ramirez died of kidney failure as a result of for cancer dissatisfied with the findings and desperate for an explanation Hospital officials sent Blood and Tissue samples from Ramirez to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 60 Mi east of San Francisco solvents were added to Ramirez blood sample organic chemicals in the blood were dissolved leaving water and blood cells behind the result is a highly concentrated extract of the chemicals in the blood Brian andreon is the director of the center here in our uh our laboratory are very precise analytical tools that allow us to look at every chemical that we extracted from the blood sample and actually determine the chemical structure and even get concentrations all down at ultra low concentration identifying the chemicals took a two-pronged approach first the extract of Ramirez blood was heated in a gas chromatograph until it vaporized because every chemical vaporizes at a different rate the components separated this spectrometer then identified each chemical by reading the patterns of light they emitted the results were then plotted on a computer in the form of Peaks and valleys what would Ramirez blood reveal every Peak here is a different unique chemical that was in the blood of Mrs Ramirez and things stand out is very obvious this is all Tylenol or acetominophen is right here cholesterol is here other drugs and a very unusual chemical that we initially discovered which was right here we don't know what it is at this moment but luckily we have libraries that when you actually search a library in the computer it will print out what this chemical is it turned out to be a high concentration of a chemical called dimethyl sulphone or dmso2 it comes from the breakdown of another chemical DMSO or dimethyl sulfoxide though it's manufactured as an industrial lubricant DMSO is used by thousands of athletes and arthritis sufferers to relieve pain it's conceivable that Ramirez was using it for this purpose but its waste product dmso2 is not toxic even in the high concentrations found in her tissues its presence did nothing to explain why the emergency room was brought to its knees from his findings andron had to conclude he'd found nothing to account for the harrowing events on the night Ramirez died without any physical explanation for what was now being called the Ramirez incident the California Department of Health Services wrote it off to mass hysteria due to stress the healthcare workers were not buying it my response to the claim of mass Hyer was not something that I can entertain personally because the people involved in emergency care and in particular this emergency room were all like a well-oiled machine they'd all had tons of experience 15 or years better Veterans of all types of occurrences and this was just something else that they had to take care of and uh you can't you can't argue with that I mean these people are not generally hysterical unwilling to accept the ruling of the health department Welch did some homework of her own she knew that many of her colleagues and she herself had suffered long-term health problems not the sort of symptoms induced by mass hysteria she gathered up lab reports medical records and contacted Brian andron andron and his colleague deputy director Patrick Grant looked over the data Welch sent them they focused on the one compound that didn't seem to fit back to him basically I came back into my office and started looking up compounds in the chemist Bible the Merc index looked up dimethyl sulf oxide and dimethyl sulfone and fortunately um they're right there together in language even a a nuclear chemist can understand and um at that point I realized that oxidation was the connector between the two can you talk to me if Ramirez was taking DMSO on her own B to relieve her pain it seemed plausible the extra oxygen she was given on the way to the hospital could have sped the chemicals transformation to its waste product dmso2 DMSO is oily and has a garlicky smell that could explain the sheen on Ramirez skin and the odor in the emergency room but it didn't explain why so many people were sickened Pat Grant began to formulate a theory on the same page in the drug manual as DMSO and dmso2 was an entry for dmso4 the only difference between the two compounds was more oxygen but it was a crucial difference dmso2 is a harmless vapor dmso4 is a deadly nerve gas and if you read the toxicities and the various symptoms that people that are exposed to dimethyl sulfate experience um it was quite similar to the Riverside incident Grant's Theory sounded good on paper but no one had ever turned harmless dmso2 into deadly dmso4 in the lab by simply adding more oxygen if Grant was asserting that a dying woman could somehow change into a canister of nerve gas he was going to have to prove it the scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had a daunting task ahead of them to see if dmso2 could turn into its deadly cousin dmso4 in the emergency room they had to replicate the conditions during the last few minutes of Gloria Ramirez life the work was assigned to analytical chemist Rich Whipple the first obstacle was the nature of the two substances while harmless dmso2 dissolves in blood deadly dmso4 doesn't so how could the compound be in Ramirez veins the answer is it couldn't our belief is that she had dmso2 in the blood and then when it was withdrawn from her system it was in converted to dmso4 the chemical event if it happened at all happened in the syringe using a substitute for human blood Whipple performed an experiment to show how a change in temperature could change the form of the chemical at body temperature dmso2 stays dissolved in the solution but cooled to room temperature it forms crystals crystals light the ones witnessed by some of the emergency room staff in her body Ramirez blood was 98.6 de but the portion drawn into the syringe was immediately cooled to around 64° the temperature of the emergency room the DraStic temperature change may have caused the dmso2 crystals to separate out everything about the theory seemed to be holding together except one crucial point Point Whipple didn't manage to produce any detectable dmso4 but lab tests can never perfectly replicate a real life situation in the emergency room only the slightest amount of dmso4 would have been needed to sicken all those staffers one1 of a gram of the substance can be lethal in smaller doses dmso4 can cause long-term nerve damage and other lingering health problems a year or more after the Ramirez incident some of the staffers in the emergency room still had symptoms Grant believes this is further evidence in favor of a chemical explanation not mass hysteria or some other psychological cause in comparison to the other theories that were out there before we proposed our chemical Theory I would believe it over Mass Hyster area of an experienced emergency room staff though Grant's findings are generally accepted many scientists await further proof before they're convinced until the mechanism for the deadly transformation is fully understood there remains a slim chance that the Ramirez incident could happen again the events in Riverside's emergency room highlight how toxic hazards can come from the least likely sources that's a fact poisoners use to their advantage since anything can be a poison the killer can hide his weapon in plain sight how you doing how are you good at 7:00 a.m. October 23rd 1988 Peggy Carr arrived at a restaurant in alturus Florida where she worked as a waitress looking good as she waited for her ship to start she began to feel ill know I just soon her legs started to burn and pain racked her chest she thought she was having a heart [Music] attack one of the regulars a former Army medic checked her pulse and reassured her that whatever was ailing her it wasn't her heart don't know but the pain continued to grow Peggy was sent home to rest the pain was unrelenting and Peggy's family sent her to the hospital is real tight and she was admitted and placed under observation I just didn't feel 16 hours after her first symptoms Peggy Carr was practically incapacitated and her position was stumped yeah 3 days and a battery of tests later doctors were no closer to making a diagnosis horse then just as mysteriously as they had begun Peggy symptoms began to fade yeah just she was sent home arms and my chest is really but within a week the crushing pain gripped her again she was rushed back to the hospital besides the intense pain in her Limbs and Joints her hair began to fall out she was becoming unable to move good tests still showed nothing wrong with her doctors thought some virus had nestled in her nervous system she told her neurologist that she felt like she was walking on hot Cals the description brought to mind something he'd only read about he decided to try one more test for thallium poisoning thallium is a natural element found in Trace Amounts in soil and water its purified form is strictly regulated up until 1972 when it was banned in the United States it was used in Rat and ant poisons tests showed that Peggy car's system had 20,000 times the amount of thallium one might expect to find the poison was eating away her nervous system there was no cure at first Peggy's poisoning was considered accidental girl from church tests on her family revealed that everyone in the car household had traces of it oh we can't decide the Poke County Sheriff department and the health department combed the car's house to find the source of the contaminant detective Ernie miny led the investigation our sole purpose was to identify that poison and have her removed from the environment to prevent further injury to any of the persons over the next month investigators collected food water and soil samples in the car's home and neighborhood you know checking out everything was sent to the lab to be tested you me okay after an impatient wait every test came back negative investigators were desperate to find the source of the poison meanwhile Peggy could no longer breathe on her own and lapsed into a coma the search for the poison continued more B how many others would be sickened before it was found among the items collected from the car's house were returnable bottles of Coca-Cola one of them was broken like this before all had residue on the bottom yeah like everything else they were sent off for analysis the bottles joined the ranks of dozens of items collected from the car's house each had been subjected jeed to the same test each had been eliminated investigators hoped to have better luck with the bottles to test for thallium the residue was dissolved in nitric acid a sample was placed in a graphite tube and vaporized then a lamp with a thallium filament was shined into the tube the test relies on the principle that every comp pound emits a specific wavelength of light an instrument called a spectrometer measured the amount of light absorbed by the sample it showed that the bottles contain more than 11 times the level of the toxin one might expect to find finally the source of the poison had been found but how did thalium get into the soft drink were others out there waiting to be consumed mincy feared a manufacturing catastrophe or malicious tampering going be able to make it over with the assistance of the FBI and the Coca-Cola company the lot numbers were traced back to the store the warehouse and the bottling plant the search came up clean no other bottles had been tainted and there had been no other reports of poisoning the tainted bottles were specific to the car's home tell me that or is it who would have done it find out about it later I think you might a poisoner must have intimate contact with his victim's surroundings in order to plant the toxin we decide that's why most poisonings are done within families that's that's up for grab and that's why suspicion fell on P car had a plan for at least three months P was Peggy's second husband they've been married only a few months when Peggy grew ill but it seemed their honeymoon was long over you bring it up miny learned that just prior to the poisoning the cars had an argument that resulted in Peggy spending the night in a hotel the weekend her symptoms first appeared pie was conveniently out of town on a hunting trip I just when he returned he resisted taking his wife to the hospital everything seemed to point to piie car but convictions aren't made on such circumstantial evidence miny's criminal investigation had just begun more evidence needed to be gathered more leads followed s here somewhere Fells Carr's every move was scrutinized almost as an afterthought he presented a convenient clue in his own defense he showed detectives a threatening note he claimed he received 2 weeks before the poisoning the cars didn't pay much attention to it at the time but Pi kept it just in case this note indicated that every who had written it wanted the entire family to move out of the state of Florida or else they would die the note along with the fact that P car had consumed some of the tainted soft drink weakened the accusations against him but he wasn't home Home Free yet he could have written the note himself and taken the poison intentionally to deflect the Paul of guilt miny kept his eye on P car while he sought other suspects who would want to kill the [Music] family mincy learned that the cars didn't get along with their neighbors George tripal and his wife Diana several weeks before the poisoning Peggy and Diana almost came to blows over the car's loud music it hardly seemed like grounds for attempted murder to find out more about the icy relationship between the neighbors mincy paid a visit to George tripal trial's reaction to the subject of the cars was unexpectedly harsh he had went into a tire about the problems with these rednecked children and family that live next to to him there kids make all kinds of noise play the radio real then mincy asked him why he thought anyone might want to harm the family I don't care what they do he quoted the threatening letter the cars had received weeks before verbatim he said exactly what was in a note nobody else knew of its existence nobody except for law enforcement at that moment George tripal became the prime suspect but mincy had no more to go on with trpa than he had with P car so he began looking into tra's surprising [Music] past tripal was an eccentric man who enjoyed creating games and crafting scenarios he also belonged to Mena an elite Society of people whose IQs are among the top two 2% in the world he and his wife were trained chemists what's more the quirky genius had done time for masterminding one of the largest amphetamine manufacturing operations in the Southeast thallium is sometimes used to make amphetamines according to John trestrail tripal had the means and the mind to orchestrate a poisoning they can can plan a script of a death uh she'll be here and she'll be eating this and then she'll do this and I'll do this and it's all laid out so I think this takes a great deal of of intelligence to plan this out this is not a brute force weapon this is mine not muscle but what would his motive be in his prison records miny found a letter tripal wrote complaining to officials about his fellow inmates radios as hard as it was to believe loud music seemed to be an overwhelming sore point for him reason on March 3rd 1989 Peggy Carr died after lingering in a coma for 3 months mincy now had to prove that tripal was a murderer with nothing but the flimsiest circumstantial evidence mincy couldn't get a search warrant for tra's house the only way to crack this case was to outsmart the certified genius after several months of background checks on George tral detective mincy was confident he poisoned Peggy car all he needed was proof but tral was too clever to leave Clues out in the open mincy needed to get inside his house and get inside his head to carry it off he needed someone to befriend the alleged killer win his confidence and then betray it for this deadly game he counted on special agent Susan goric she became Sher Gwyn a woman on the verge of divorce who counted on trial's shoulders to cry she met him at a party that he organized for menum members it's theme call M May and do that I learned a lot about his personality and about his habits about his associates um one of the things that I learned was that he did have a a large ego I I did use my personality of Sherry to play off of that ego and to get him to talk more and I use that to my advantage I tell you I don't think you can ask the Friendship blossomed slowly foring to maintain her Sher person for a full year all the while she lived in fear that tral would see through her masquerade putting her life in danger slowly she gathered what evidence she could to build her case hoping he' tip his hand as the months went by she didn't have much I gained a multitud of small evidence small statements that all put together was overwhel whelming but if you looked at one small statement it did not look like a lot of evidence like playing an excruciating game of hangman gor slowly Drew her picture of tripal as the murderer but even after a year she was still waiting to add that final stroke essential to win the game finally In December 1989 goric got the break she needed tripal and his wife moved out of town and allowed Sherry Gwyn to rent their house as a tenant she could search the entire property without a warrant she'd gotten all she could out of tripal perhaps now his house would give up his secrets she called in the P County crime scene unit they combed the premises collect whatever they could find believing tripal would be too smart to have kept any thalium around his house they looked for its Telltale residue I truly believe that if we were going to find thalium that it would probably be either in the air conditioning filter or possibly down one of the drains and we spent a lot of time with the crime scen people swapping the drains trying to get any residue that he may have poured out while some investigators were in the house looking for trace evidence others collected vials of chemicals from the garage everything was labeled and sent to the FBI for analysis months went by before the results came back I assume because it took so long with the lab report that they didn't find anything but goric was wrong when the reports came back they showed that one of the vials picked up from the workbench in tra's garage contained thallium powder for goric and mincy 15 months of deception paid off the evidence to convict George tripal of poisoning the cars was in hand at trial's trial it was clear that he was a Killer without a conscience like the murder weekend party he organized death was just a game to him George trael had absolutely no remorse for his actions he justified it with his Superior intelligence and the fact that people with lesser intelligence did not deserve to live on this planet unlike most poisoners trp's motive was neither love nor money yeah yeah okay he wanted to kill his neighbors simply because he found them annoying according to John trestrail the ego that led him to think so little of others ultimately led to his own demise the container containing the evidence was left in his home why would he do that he was a very intelligent man didn't he look down the road to say I better get rid of this bottle now his ego said they'll never get this far they'll never figure out how this happened a jury found George trapal guilty of 14 felony counts including first-degree murder in the death of Peggy Carr he was sentenced to death as we go about our daily lives most of us seldom think about the toxic world we live in in the past that lack of diligence provided the poisoners greatest opportunity but now science is catching up more than ever unexplained deaths are viewed with suspicion and in the lab more of those suspicions are being [Music] justified police find a family murdered in their home the victims are covered with strange marks to catch the killer forensics experts must find out what caused the wounds a request for roadside assistance is a pretext for murder can Telltale marks on a car battery connect the killer to the crime police are on the trail of a psychopath investigators must rely on an ordinary screwdriver to stop him in his tracks like fingerprints tool marks found at a crime scene can single out a murderer more than one killer has tripped himself up on his own tools of [Music] death in January 1992 police responded to a call made by the neighbors of Juan and Olga [Music] Hernandez they reported a violent commotion coming from their [Music] home police permit upon entering Chicago officers found the body of Juan Hernandez lying face down in the living room he was apparently beaten and [Music] killed [Music] as they cautiously searched the house police entered the [Music] nursery one and discovered Olga Hernandez was also dead nearby lay the body of her 10-month-old [Music] daughter the Hernandez home showed no signs of forced entry the killer or Killers left no clues to their [Music] identity homom the detectives on Chicago's homicide Squad had seen a lot of horrible crimes but nothing in their experience could have prepared them for what they witnessed that night from the brutality of the murders it looked as though the killer had come there with the sole purpose of killing this family detective Richard Zuli was one of the detectives on the scene it was actually the worst beating I've ever seen and initially we couldn't tell whether or not it was just a beating or if there was a weapon like a shotgun maybe involved because there was just so much uh so much blood on the scene the medical examiner determined that the victims had been beaten to death with a weapon that left hundreds of U and j-shaped bruises neither the medical examiner nor the officers at the scene could identify what could have caused the peculiar marks zuli's partner detective John Murray knew they had no chance of finding the weapon until they knew what it was time is of the essence because if we can identify what it was and we were thinking of a a meat tenderizer a tire jack things now it would be important to get back to the scene or the or the area of the murder to try to recover it detectives knew that identifying what caused the marks was the first step to finding the killer 171 dispatch start rescue code gray whoever he was he had thoroughly covered his tracks leaving behind Only The Telltale wounds any tool leaves its mark on the object it manipulates in police work that principle is usually applied to [Music] firearms to see if a particular gun had been used in a crime a ballistics expert test fires [Music] [Music] it the signature markings on the test fire bullet are then compared with markings on the bullet retrieved from the crime [Music] scene if the markings are the same the case is [Music] made when a tool is used in a beating death the task is a similar one by examining characteristics of a victim's wounds experts can often prove that one tool and one tool only was the instrument of death hoping to identify the wounds on the bodies of Juan and Olga Hernandez the medical examiner sent photos of the markings to the Chicago police crime lab forensic investigator Bill Sherlock an expert in firearms and Tool mark identification compared the marks against various tools believe the baby that was murdered in this case the wounds were consistent inside size and shape bruises left by a heavy object but in the curved area at the bottom of each wound the skin had been broken we weren't sure what type of tool it was I was not aware of any tool that would make this kind of marks any any store-bought tool any of the the tools that are used by the various trades so it was kind of a challenge to try and find out what made these particular markings after nearly a week of testing one kind of tool after another Sherlock could not find an absolute match the most likely weapon was the butt of an automatic pistol but Sherlock wasn't completely satisfied with that conclusion if used like a hammer the butt of a pistol could have caused the bruises on the victim's skin but not the lacerations the marks looked somewhat consistent with the the marks from a butt of a gun uh we couldn't explain why we had the tearing of the skin why we had the shapes that we had a chance event provided detective Zuli with a possible [Music] explanation off duty he realized he held a likely answer in the palm of his hand at home one day I was cleaning my gun and as I slid the magazine out of the gun I was cleaning it and looking at it and I thought gee that's kind of similar in shape to the uh to the uh the wounds with its magazine removed the butt of a semi-automatic pistol would have thinner sharper edges more capable of leaving the mark seen on the murder victims without the magazine and its bullets the gun would be lighter and less effective as a bludgeon it would have taken longer to inflict fatal [Music] wounds Sherlock tested his theory on a slab of modeling [Music] clay the butt of a medium caliber pistol produced marks of the same size and shape as the wounds on the [Music] victims so now we kind of knew that we were looking for that that a gun was used to do this but we still didn't know what gun or or where or anything else that came later forensics had identified the type of weapon used to commit the crimes but could it be linked to a killer tapping their sources officers on the narcotics Squad got a tip from a prostitute who'd heard something on the street she told police that a woman named Patricia Johnson seemed to know about the killings busy her boyfriend was a known drug dealer a Cuban named Ronaldo travo police brought him in for questioning he refused to talk meanwhile detectives checked the victim's phone records on the night they were murdered Juan and ogga Hernandez had ordered a pizza questioned by the police the delivery man said on the night of the killings he recalled going to the address of Juan and ogga Hernandez but when a woman answered the door she told him she hadn't ordered a pizza police brought him to a lineup that included the suspect's girlfriend Patricia Johnson he recognized her as the woman who'd answered the door at the Hernandez [Music] home when Johnson was told she'd been picked out of the lineup she admitted being at the house that night she told police travo was the killer her willingness to talk was a stark contrast to her boyfriend he was stoic and friendly and and very polite uh but a guy that could sit upright in a chair for hours and talk to freely Murray questioned travo again years of interviewing suspects have taught the detective to read subtle gestures that could reveal More Than Words alone but travo wasn't playing if if you were conscious like we are very often on the uh the body English very very very important this guy showed nothing nothing a real sociopath but police were sure he knew something a witness had ided his girlfriend who had turned on him and he was named by an informant as detectives turned up the pressure travo decided to come clean the story had begun 2 years earlier when he and Juan Hernandez came over from Cuba together they planned to get rich dealing drugs but that wasn't how it worked out at least for Hernandez both were in the drug business and as time went on the murderer became quite quite a bit more successful in the drug trade than the victim in their first year of business travo had supplied Hernandez with a kilo of cocaine to sell the street value was approximately $20,000 but the drugs disappeared and the money never materialized travo demanded payment but Hernandez held him off a month later travo decided to give Hernandez a second chance and gave him another kilo to sell but that too disappeared travo had trusted Hernandez and his trust had been betrayed now it was time to collect Patricia Johnson's statement confirmed that travo had used the butt of his gun to kill Juan and Olga the confessions had come as a surprise but the law demands more than a confession to ensure a conviction at trial the defense could argue that a confession was coerced or the defendant could recant it to make their case police needed to provide corroborating evidence they needed to find the weapon Johnson had told police she'd wrapped the gun in a plastic sack from a moving car she tossed it off a bridge into the [Music] river to Aid divers in their search for the weapon Zuli and Murray crisscrossed the bridge tossing out stones of similar size and weight as a medium caliber pistol John and I spent a day driving across that bridge with rocks about the same size and weight of a medium medium caliber weapon we drove across throwing them out of the squad car and into the river and noting that they were all Landing about the same distance from the bridge in about the same place to coordinate their search divers stretched polyester rope across the river forming a grid it took them less than half an hour to find the sack containing the gun near the spot where Zuli and Murray had tossed their [Music] Stones the weapon was a 32 Caliber semi-automatic pistol with its magazine removed police believed it could have caused the unusual wounds on the victim's bodies but to prove it Beyond A Reasonable Doubt the detectives need did harder evidence evidence only a forensics expert could provide police divers in Chicago had found what they believed to be a murder weapon in a plastic bag Cuban immigrant Juan Hernandez had taken drugs to sell on consignment then never delivered the cash now he his wife and his infant child were dead any I've got those slid now we Bill Sherlock of the Chicago police crime lab attempted to establish the gun as the murder weapon not as a firearm but as a tool used to bludgeon the victims to death Sherlock had already determined that the unusual wounds on the victim's bodies were most likely caused by the butt of a semi-automatic pistol with its magazine removed as we're looking at the uh the marks on the victim's heads it's consistent with the tearing being with the front portion of the um magazine well the thinner metal the side wall and also the the magazine release back here the serration from the magazine release at first glance Sherlock believed the pistol found by divers could have caused the wounds to make a positive identification he obtained a copy of the autopsy photographs being sure they were exactly to scale he then obtained a one toone transparency of the butt of the gun with its magazine [Music] removed he placed the transparency over the life-size photograph of the wound [Music] after closely comparing the gun's metal edges with the cuts on the victims Sherlock felt he had a perfect [Music] match his testimony could now remove any doubts about the statements of the two defendants he'd forged an irrefutable link between them and the tool of death what it was invaluable for was in bringing this case into court and having um a solid piece of expert testimony to present in court to the jurors and say this is this because this is the results of my tests um that's a lot more powerful than detective zulie or detective Murray standing there going gez it looks the same I think it's the same they were able to to to show conclusively that it was the same Ronaldo tavo's pistol became a bludgeon by accident he'd come to the home of Juan Hernandez hoping one last time to get the money he was owed but Hernandez didn't have enough travo put the pistol to his head and pulled the trigger but the magazine jammed and raged he resorted to beating his victim in the process the gun magazine fell out when the pizza man arrived travo had already be gun beating Juan Hernandez with the butt of his [Music] gun but the unpaid debt hadn't been satisfied after Juan was killed Olga Hernandez would also die along with the baby she did everything to protect and clearly and Examining The Scene It was apparent to uh to us that uh Mrs Hernandez was doing what she could to try to protect her child during the course of this attack that involved a whole emotional thing that uh that you have to deal with two on the scene um you know when you recreate the scene and you're RIS visualizing what happens you're creating all this so you can imagine the terror and the the fear and everything else that was [Music] happening hopefully we'll never see them on the street again no tool Mark evidence had made a critical difference in putting Ronaldo travo and Patricia Johnson Behind Bars both were sent to prison for [Music] life in Louisiana in 1984 police had to rely on more subtle tool Mark evidence to crack a case of murder responding to the report of a shooting in the small town of Zachary 15 mi from Baton Rouge Police found a car with its Hood raised parked at the side of the road nearby lay the body of George Thompson shot at close range with a shotgun no one witnessed the shooting and the killer left no obvious Clues but battery cables dangling from the front of the victim's car gave police an idea of what had [Music] happened one end of the cables was still attached to the victim's [Music] battery had he been the one who needed a boost or had he stopped to help someone else the victim's car started without any problem apparently he had pulled off the road to assist another driver if police could find the second car they might also locate the killer a Baton Rouge detective visited the wife of the victim good afternoon ma'am I'm Detective Tom har I just have a couple of questions to ask about your husand she had gone to church on the night of the murder when she returned home around 10: p.m. her husband told her he had to help someone start his car he left without saying exactly where he was going according to Lo Thompson her husband rarely went out that late whoever it was he was going to help must have been a close friend Lois Thompson never saw her husband again it seemed to police that the call for assistance was a trap they suspected the killer may have lured the victim to the crime scene with a plea for help if so the battery cables might bear the Killer's fingerprints they were sent for examination to forensic expert Pat Lane of the Louisiana crime lab he placed the cables in a fuming chamber designed to make latent fingerprints [Music] visible but the test results were negative well we didn't come up with any fingerprints on any of the clamps or the cable so essentially the fingerprint examination was a wash out and I thought that that I was going to be through with this evidence at that time the case stalled until a few days later when detectives got a phone call that brought them a lead the caller told police to check out a parking lot at an apartment complex in Baton Rouge Police found a yellow Buick that matched the description of the second car observed by a passer by prior to the murder it belonged to Brenda Perkins the tip was placed by her neighbor a relative of the victim faced with suspicion of involvement in a murder Perkins was more than willing to talk to police detective Bernie Taylor of the Zachary police was at the scene one of the questions that you know naturally came up is well you know if you been having trouble with his car perhaps you know battery trouble the car had a brand new battery Perkins told police she'd had no trouble starting it so at this point here we you know kind of fits in with our thought that hey this was a setup deal there was no car trouble to begin with it just was lured out there under that pretense th just put two and two together Perkins explained that her Uncle Earl Thomas had borrowed the car on the night of the murder Thomas was the brother-in-law of the murder victim but but Brenda Perkins had even more damaging [Music] evidence the day of the murder she'd gone shopping with Earl Thomas he'd made only one purchase shotgun shells Perkins asked him why he needed them at first he said for hunting but with deer season several weeks away she prodded him to tell her the truth [Music] he said he planned to murder his brother-in-law the victim George [Music] Thompson a receipt found in the trunk of Perkins car total $2.97 plus tax Brenda had noticed both the size and brand name of the shells her uncle had [Music] purchased to check out her story the detectives went to the same store and purchased a similar box of [Music] shells the amount on the receipt was 297 plus tax exactly the same as the receipt found in the car Lane also found Thomas's thumb print on the shop shopping bag the detectives now had circumstantial evidence that Earl Thomas was the killer but they required something more [Music] solid they looked for what they needed under the hood of the victim's car through forensics they hoped to turn a scratched piece of soft lead into hard [Music] evidence in the murder of George Thompson Louisiana police were building their case against his brother-in-law Earl Thomas had Thomas set a trap for Thompson calling for help and then killing him the case was missing one crucial element a way to link Thomas to the crime scene booster cables were still attached to the victim's car battery if the victim had time to attach the cables to the Killer's car the clamps may have left marks on the battery the battery of the car driven by the suspect Earl Thomas had fresh tool marks apparently made by a booster cable police asked forensic examiner Pat Lane to see if the marks were made by the cables found at the crime scene it was the only way to place the suspect's car at the scene just like people every tool leaves behind a unique fingerprint that can be used to identify it the suspect's battery not only had bite marks left by the teeth of a booster cable it also had a scratch apparently caused when the cable was hastily removed Lane suspected that a single Le tooth on one of the jaws of the cable may have caused the scratch to test his theory he took the cable found at the crime scene and made test marks on a flat piece of lead a comparison microscope enables him to examine two sets of marks at the same time on one side were the marks on the suspect's battery clamp on the other the marks made by the victim's battery cables the ultimate determination in any twark examination is was this tool or this instrument responsible for making a particular Mark and in this particular examination my determination was the mark that we see on this clamp here in the Monitor and this reference mark that I know to have been made by the jumper cables have the same Source tool Mark evidence had placed the car driven by Earl Thomas at the scene of the crime a warrant was issued for his arrest but Thomas had gone to California his address was unknown detectives traced all the calls he made to his sister in Baton Rouge to a public phone booth in East Los Angeles within days he was picked up at the booth by Los Angeles police they didn't have a hard time spotting him he was a tall man missing his left arm detective Bernie Taylor and his partner Charlie Clark had already pieced together how the killing occurred the victim was married to Thomas's sister but was being unfaithful to uphold the family honor Thomas decided to put a stop to his brother-in-law's philandering once and for all he borrowed perkins's car then called the victim pretending to need [Music] help as the victim clamped a booster cable to the battery of Thomas's car Thomas retrieved his shotgun I told you to leave her alone it was a nice Theory but Thomas denied any involvement in the crime detective Clark was concerned a jury might think a one-armed man incapable of firing a shotgun you ever do any hunting oh yeah I love hunt yeah oh we what kind of hunting you do do squirrels just generally hunting it's just fun what kind of gun do you hunt with what shotgun but Thomas's gift for gab tripped him up well what do you think I think he's a con artist Earl was C artist he uh rambled you ask him about the case then he would start rambling on something else and uh so we decided to we knew that he did hunt and uh so we started asking about his hunting and uh so I asked him uh well Earl how do you uh handle that shotgun when you only got one hand you know and Earl said well I just put this arm out like this and lay that shotgun on it here and steady it and he said no problem I told you I told you to leave her alone don't do that to her man Earl Thomas successfully entrapped his brother-in-law with his scheme but the hunter also unwittingly snared himself the scratches from the clamp marked Thomas as the killer this lead clamp $1.98 8 cent piece of lead put a man in jail for 20 plus years when Bernie Taylor brought this piece of evidence into the laboratory I knew exactly what he wanted before he ever finished the request and I told Bernie at that time I said Bernie it's theoretically possible but I have to tell you it's a long shot but we'll give it our best shot and ultimately this piece of evidence uh was linked to not just one pair of of jumper cables not just one clamp but to one tooth on one clamp of that pair of jumper cables let you get back in and get set in the small town of Zachary solid detective work turned a case of circumstantial evidence into a conviction based on Forensic Science and and so the challenge to us is to find and to establish the link from the crime scene to that individual and when that takes place there's there's usually not cameras and lights there's not a lot of Glamour there is a tremendous amount of satisfaction in going home at night and knowing that the work that I've done has made this town a little bit safer place to live in Thompson's death was the result of a personal Vendetta but in Florida in 1990 murder became a terrifyingly random event and police were Paralyzed by lack of [Music] Clues on August 26th students were returning for the fall semester at the University of Florida in Gainesville on that Sunday afternoon Ricky and George Powell went to the campus to see their daughter Christina new apartment but when they arrived neither their daughter nor her roommate answered the door or telephone the parents asked the building manager to let them in but the women had changed the lock the manager didn't have a key the Powell's concern grew with every hour their daughter was away fearing the worst they contacted the police a Gainesville police officer met the them at the apartment he then forced open the door as he entered he saw a dead woman posed on the couch he blocked the parents from following him he didn't want them to disturb the evidence and he feared the killer might still be inside [Music] but the officer found not the killer but a second murder victim both women had been raped then [Music] stabbed the brutality of the crime and the way the bodies had been staged made police fear that they were dealing with more than a random killer whoever murdered these women was cunning and methodical police feared it would only be a matter of time before he struck [Music] again to help investigate the brutal double slaying police throughout the county assisted the Gainesville police among them was detective sergeant lran huitt of the alatua County Sheriff's Office and then the killer struck closer to home I gotard andwood I about midnight um Sunday night one of our record clerks at the lwood County Sheriff's Office failed to show up for work um her supervisor and co-workers got concerned about that and notified our Watch Commander a deputy was sent to Christa hoy's apartment no one came to the front door but he saw a gap in her Venetian blinds the deputy got on his knees and and put his flashlight up into uh the room that was there and it happened to be uh Christa hoy's bedroom and she was uh sitting on the side of the bed in a staged position uh [Music] decapitated adding to the horror 2 Days Later two more victims were found raped and stabbed in a similar fashion check [Music] out news of the killings electrified the University of Florida campus it's currently 27 minutes past the top of the hour just a reminder for University of Florida students back for the new semester make sure you stay safe keep doors and windows locked call Snap the student nighttime auxiliary Patrol if you need an escort around campus police are increasing Patrols in the southwest Gainesville area around student apartment complexes special agent Ed dicks of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement recalls the mood in Gainesville at the time of the killings uh the city of Gainesville sort of started feeling a sense of Terror and the university has some 40,000 students of which probably 20,000 or more are uh females uh parents started coming to get their children they it wasn't enough that they call for a wellbeing check they actually just started showing up the kids were calling home saying I'm ready to go uh to the point that the University was closed for a week the police feared a ritual killer was on the [Music] loose a Serial madman who claimed five victims in 3 [Music] days in each case he forced his way past the locks on the doors at the first location he jimmied the lock of a wooden door at the second and third locations he'd removed the security pin from a sliding glass door special agent Ed dicks believed the same tool had been used at the last two locations the sliding glass door had been broken and pride and had left some marks in the aluminum the police photographed the damaged areas around each of the sliding doors where the killer had gained entry a section of the wooden door frame from the first location also was removed and sent to Tool Mark examiner David warnant at the crime lab in Jacksonville experience told warnant immediately what class of tool had been used to enter the victim's homes and the question was what type of Tool uh was used to make the damage in the door sections from the first crime scene I looked at them and uh could tell the investigators initially that they were looking for 516 inch uh screwdriver with a type of Blade that has a serrated tip or a corrugated uh type of tip on it police removed the doors from the second and third crime scenes and sent them to the lab they suspected the crimes were linked but had no evidence to prove it if they could match the tool marks found at the three crime scenes they could prove the same person was responsible a week later two doors came into the laboratory the door from the second crime scene and the door from the third crime scene I looked at the doors and found that there was damage around the lock on the door from the second crime scene and also on the door jam which came in with it on the door from the third crime scene there was also damage around the lock and also I found that there was damage up around the security pin there was a series of scratches in the security pin around the security pin hole and what I noticed was they were very typical and they appear to have been caused by trying to Jimmy the door and remove the security pin and gain entry warnant made a silicone cast of the damage on each of the doors the silicone is mixed with a hardening [Music] agent when it sets it forms a perfect impression after studying The Impressions from the three crime scenes warnant concluded that the killer used a screwdriver with a 5/16 in serrated blade police now knew that they were dealing with one killer who used the same screwdriver to break into his victim's homes if they could find the screwdriver they would find the killer over the next 4 months throughout Florida if a suspect was arrested with a screwdriver on his person or in his car the tool was sent to David warnant examined under a microscope even the blade of a brand new screwdriver leaves a striated Mark that's totally unique it becomes more distinctive over time acquiring the Nicks and scratches that come from use but after examining dozens of screwdrivers warnant found nothing that matched the tool marks at the crime scene police had few leads and no immediate suspects a killer was on the loose and they feared that more women would [Music] die in November of 1990 4 months after the first murder in Gainesville police got a break from a routine computer check a man picked up in Ella for robbery was wanted in sheveport Louisiana for shooting his father the computer had already identified sheveport as the scene of a crime very similar to the murders in Gainesville it might be a coincidence but special agent Ed dicks decided to look for a connection between the suspect in ellaa and the Gainesville murders meanwhile Sergeant detective lran huitt was following a different lead months earlier shortly after the murders a bank in Gainesville had been robbed it was not far from the second murder scene shortly after the robbery police officers saw two men enter the woods nearby the suspects eluded police who called for backup a tracking dog was dispatched to pick up the [Music] scent it led police to a small makeshift [Music] campsite there they found a large number of die marked bills apparently stolen in the bank robbery that day [Music] in a duffel bag police found a semi-automatic weapon like the one used by the robber some duct tape and a cassette player duct tape on the tape was what seemed to be a veiled [Music] message be the man on the tape identified himself as Danny Rowling he sang a total of 11 songs he'd written himself mostly to the tune of the House of the Rising Sun the tape ended with what was possibly the chilling Prelude to murder this is not the road I wanted but I will walk it like a man I got something I got to do the tape proved that rolling had been in Gainesville at the same time the killings occurred look like some blood on the clubs at the campsite police had also found a screwdriver but at the time there had been no reason to suspect Rollings involvement in murder his apparent ammo was bank robbery a crime far removed from brutal sex crimes at first the screwdriver wasn't examined the investigators had said it was essentially a screwdriver from a campsite that was occupied by a bank robber and at that time no one attached any significance to the campsite but there was evidently something in the back of my mind that just said you know told me not to eliminate the tool warnant decided to take a closer look at the screwdriver I placed the tests on the uh from the screw with from the screwdriver from the campsite on the microscope and also my silicone cast of the marks from the door from the third crime scene and within about 5 or 10 minutes I all of a sudden saw a tremendous correspondence of individual characteristics and thought to myself I've just identified the screwdriver is making the damage on the door from the third crime scene he performed a similar test on the sliding door from the second crime scene and again compared them directly to the screwdriver in this case and I was able to see enough correspondents to say that the screwdriver from the campsite caused the damage on the door and the door jam from the second crime scene what you got here boy the tool marks Pro that the screwdriver found at Danny Rowling's campsite was the same tool used to break into the victim's Apartments faced with the mounting evidence against him Rowling decided to reveal the criminal life he'd [Music] LED as a burglar he developed a talent for breaking and entering houses while the occupants were asleep his whole life he well his I suppose since he was a teenager he had spent as a Peeping Tom and then as a burglar then as a rapist and he was extremely good burglar uh he um seemed to enjoy breaking in with people in the house the cat burglar scenario and and enjoyed being able to go in there and do whatever he wanted to do without waking anyone up like so many other serial killers rowlings had begun as a Peeping Tom peering in women's windows in the dark then he became a cat burglar and progressed to murder his break-in tool of Choice was a screwdriver with a serrated blade 516 of an inch wide he was proud of his ability to open any door without a sound from there it was apparently one short step to rape then murder culminating on the night of August 26th 1990 um he said as he was peeping in the windows he saw a girl uh changing clothes or just come from the shower uh which turned out to be Tracy paus and he said when he saw her he knew that that she was the one his choice for the evening the knife rolling used to kill his victims was never recovered instead police had found a much more valuable tool Rowling had left 27 scratch marks on the doors at the crime scenes it was more than enough to prove his guilt it is further ordered in a judge that the defendant Danny Harold Rawling is hereby sentenced to death the defendant is hereby committed to the Department of Corrections of the State of Florida for execution of this sentence as provided by law may God have mercy on his soul done and ordered this 20th day of April 1994 tool mark identification is perhaps the simplest weapon in the Crim Stoppers [Music] Arsenal requiring little more than a visual comparison but for juries it's compelling evidence if a tool can be traced to a suspect only a few faint scratches may be enough to solve the [Music] crime

Channel: The New Detectives

Views: 872,896

Keywords: DNA analysis, The New Detectives, crime-solving tools, criminal behavior, criminal evidence analysis, criminal forensics, criminal intent analysis, criminal justice, criminal motive analysis, criminal profiling techniques, criminal psychology, criminalistics fieldwork, evidence collection protocol, forensic entomology, forensic techniques, lethal substances, murder cases, murder investigation, poison detection, true crime series, unsolved murders

Id: qaxcNcrMAFc

Length: 156min 57sec (9417 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 03 2024