[suspenseful music] BOB HAYDEN: He considered
himself irresistible to young women. MAUREEN GEOGHEGAN: He was
extremely controlling. It was like anybody that
came in contact with him, he ran their brain. BOB HAYDEN: And when she
resisted, he became infuriated. RALUCA: I killed my cousin. What makes you think
I won't kill you? I don't think he
belongs on the streets. Animals belong in cages. [theme music] NARRATOR: In the
summer of 1984, kids across America are popping,
locking, and moonwalking-- in other words, break dancing. 14-year-old Angelo Wong and
his friends are no exception. We lived it and breathed
it morning, noon, and night. I probably thought about
it and practiced it more than I did my
schoolwork at that time. NARRATOR: Tuesday,
July 17, 1984. A local disco has scheduled
a break dancing contest for that evening. Angelo and his crew
spend the day practicing, while Angelo's kid
Sister Angela tags along. She was definitely an
athletic girl from a young age. Headstrong. She kept me on my toes. NARRATOR: Around 4:00
PM, practice breaks up and the kids scatter. Angelo goes inside to clean
up for the night's contest. His sister sets out on
foot for a nearby mall. That night at the
disco, she's a no-show. And then when we got home and
my mother started making phone calls, and we were looking
around the neighborhood-- not around the neighborhood,
but on the block asking around if anyone had seen her. And the phone calls-- we were
getting nowhere with the phone calls. I guess concern
really set in then. My gut feeling was there
was something seriously wrong. NARRATOR: Angela's
father joins local cops in the search for his daughter. As the morning pressed on,
more police officers came. And my heart started just
getting tighter and tighter and tighter. NARRATOR: Shortly
after 11:00 AM, police scanners crackle to life. Just a few hundred yards
from the tidy bungalows of Camp Road,
officer Lynda Curtiss has made a discovery
in the woods. When I first saw it, I
thought it was a mannequin. And when I took a harder look,
I realized it was a body. NARRATOR: The body is that of a
young girl, partially clothed, lying face-down beneath a
log at the edge of the pond. She is pulled from the swamp
and taken to the morgue, where her father is waiting
to make a positive ID. There's a certain essence--
there's a certain feeling when you walk into an ME's office. And as soon as I walked in, I-- I had that dreaded feeling. And there was an ME there
with the body of my daughter in front of me. NARRATOR: Nassau County medical
examiner Leslie Lukash performs the autopsy on Angela Wong. The cause of death
here was determined to be drowning,
homicidal drowning. NARRATOR: Cuts and bruises
on the victim's face indicate a severe
beating before death. She was beaten about
the face by blunt force, probably by a fist, and
she sustained these myriad of contusions and abrasions. NARRATOR: Despite
the fact that Angela was found partially
naked, her body yields no evidence of rape. The autopsy does, however,
provide one clue that will prove crucial later. She liked to eat
potatoes and rice. NARRATOR: Angela had her
last meal at home sometime before 4:00 PM. The contents of her stomach
tell investigators she was dead shortly thereafter. So the degree
of digestion was-- to be reasonable, was
less than an hour. As a matter of fact, it
was even less than an hour. It was recently consumed. NARRATOR: Nassau County
detective Jack Sharkey picks up the case. He begins by constructing
a timeline of Angela Wong's last day on earth. She had gotten up kind of late
that day at around 12:00 noon. And we had her activity
right down until 4:30, when she was last seen
heading off towards the mall. NARRATOR: The detective
pounds the pavement, looking for the answer
to a simple question. Who was the last known person
to see Angela Wong alive? After hundreds of leads,
tips, and interviews, the trail leads right back
to the victim's inner circle of family and friends. We zeroed in on that
break dancing team and also the five youths who really
hung out in the Angela Wong household. NARRATOR: One by one, members
of the break dancing team are interviewed and asked to
account for their whereabouts between 4:30 and 5:00,
the time when Angela was most likely murdered. All are cleared save one. Manny Pacheco is a 15-year-old
friend of Angela Wong and self-styled ladies' man. Manny says that
he leaves alone and he started walking
north towards his house. And at some point-- at some point, he
turns and looks back. And he says that he
sees Angela walking with another young youth who
he only described as wearing a black cut-off T-shirt. NARRATOR: Pacheco can
provide no further details about the mysterious teenager
in the black T-shirt. Pacheco claims he spent
the next hour getting clean then dressed for the
break dancing contest. It is his statement that
cannot be corroborated, and one that leaves a veteran
detective feeling uneasy. The thing that bothered
me was Manny, basically, was the last one to see her. Two, I also learned that he
was the only one who did not participate the next day
coming back to the household to look for her. Even though it had been raining
out, there were six or seven-- or there was a group of eight
kids who went into those woods. They split up four and four. Right? But there's no Manny. NARRATOR: Adding to Sharkey's
suspicions, the location of the crime scene. Angela's body was found near a
well-worn shortcut to the mall. According to friends
and family, it is a trail that Angela never
would have walked alone or with a stranger. I knew my sister very well. I knew how she felt
about those woods. And going back
there by herself-- never happened. Her going back there
with someone we trusted, she trusted, especially a
male figure, absolutely. NARRATOR: Suspicions aside,
investigators have nothing solid on Manny Pacheco, or
anyone else for that matter. As time passes, leads dry up,
and the murder of Angela Wong drops into the cold files. That is, until the ladies'
man begins beating his ladies, and his ladies start talking. He was extremely controlling. It was like anybody that
came in contact with him, he ran their brain. NARRATOR: On a
summer day in 1984, 11-year-old Angela Wong sets out
on foot for the local shopping mall. The following day, she is
found dead in the woods. Just, you know,
had a heart of gold. Would always say
what was on her mind. She was always that bubbly
type of person and personality. And she always had that smile. That was just a radiant
thing about Angela. NARRATOR: Nassau County
detective Jack Sharkey works the case, focusing
on the last known person to see the victim alive-- a neighborhood Romeo
named Manny Pacheco. Despite a lot of hard talk,
Sharkey can never make his case against Pacheco, and the
investigation goes cold. Yeah, it is frustrating. So you just keep--
you just keep working. You just keep working. Time is on our side. NARRATOR: Six years
later, Sharkey decides to give the case a fresh look. Buried in the files, he comes
upon a bit of information perhaps overlooked or
misunderstood in 1984. It is the eyewitness account
of a local neighborhood girl placing Manny Pacheco
with the victim not far from the woods
where her body was found. And approximately at 4:20,
she positively identifies Manny Pacheco and Angela
Wong walking together going into that entrance
into the backwoods. No doubt about it in her mind. NARRATOR: Sharkey tracks down
the girl, who tells Sharkey she remembers that day
because it was the day before her 13th birthday. She remembers the
time because she was on her way to see a 4:30
showing of the film "Gremlins." And she remembers Manny
Pacheco because she, like so many other neighborhood
girls, had a crush on him. So I wanted to brace
Manny with all those. Of course, naturally,
he just denied. She was mistaken. And I said, not really mistaken,
because of the fact that she knew you-- even to the point she knew what
beautiful brown eyes you had. NARRATOR: Sharkey
offers the suspect a ticket off the hot seat. All he has to do is
pass a polygraph exam. Pacheco agrees to
take the test, but he won't agree to sit still. Now he's fidgety. He's constantly moving. After the first test, he's told,
please, you have to remain, or I cannot get good
readings on you. Well, he deliberately
does it again. And then the third test, he
does the exact same thing. NARRATOR: Pacheco's constant
fidgeting throws off the polygraph, and the examiner
marks the suspect down as unsuitable for the test. I said, well, the bottom
line is, really, he's lying. He's lying through deception. He's not listening
to instructions, and he knows how to beat it
only by constant movement. NARRATOR: Detective
Sharkey is now convinced that Manny Pacheco is
both a liar and a killer. But with no hard
evidence, the detective is at yet another dead end. Shortly after the
polygraph exam, Manny Pacheco packs
his bags and jets off to a new life in California,
while the murder case of Angela Wong once again goes cold. Detective Michael Kuhn was
a 35-year-old patrol officer when Angela Wong was killed. Working out of a
different precinct at the other edge of the
county, Kuhn knew very little about the case. That begins to change
one day in 1997. We received a phone call
from a local village police department. They had arrested a pedophile. And they still had the
Angela Wong reward poster hanging in their office. And they called us
and they asked us if we were interested in
interviewing this person, thinking there may be a
connection because he was a pedophile. NARRATOR: Detective Kuhn
pulls the cold file, immerses himself in the details,
and interviews the suspect. He finds no connection between
the pedophile and the murder, but he does begin to feel
a personal connection to the case. Well, the worst part of it
was there's an 11-year-old girl that was murdered. It looked like she was-- someone tried to rape her. That was horrific enough. So I became interested in trying
to solve that particular case. NARRATOR: Detective Kuhn
returns to the case file and quickly finds his
investigative theory rolling along the same tracks laid
down by Detective Sharkey. Well, one thing that
was very interesting was they called
her a scaredy cat. She was afraid to
go into those woods where she was
eventually found dead. She wouldn't go in there alone. The only person she
would go in there with is a male that she trusted. NARRATOR: On the short list of
people who fit that profile-- Manny Pacheco. Kuhn runs a criminal
history, and finds Pacheco living in California
on the wrong side of the law. I found out that he had
two orders of protections against him out in California,
and those orders of protection involved women that
he was living with. An order of protection
is something that-- another name for it's
a restraining order. NARRATOR: LAPD detectives
Mike Berchem and Eric Mosher are conducting a separate
investigation of Manny Pacheco on charges of battery
and molestation. They help detective Kuhn fill
in the blanks with regards to Pacheco's legal troubles
in the City of Angels. In this case, it was an
order that was to Manny Pacheco from one of his girlfriends
that said you are not to be within a certain distance. You are not to have contact. You are not to call. And those things usually
stem from some type of domestic violence
kind of situation. He told me Manny was
living with two women. He abused both of them,
according to the women. And that he'd also
been accused of abusing his own 9-year-old daughter. Now, that piqued my interest. We have an 11-year-old
girl who was apparently abused and murdered,
and now he's allegedly abusing his own daughter. So our plan was to go
out and find these people and interview them
and start sort of building a profile on what
Manny Pacheco was all about. NARRATOR: Detective Kuhn catches
a westbound 747 to Vegas, eager for a chat with one of
Manny Pacheco's scorned women and a chance to see if she
knows anything about the murder of Angela Wong. It's been a rough road
for Maureen Geoghegan. After a decade of physical abuse
at the hands of her boyfriend Manny Pacheco, the
31-year-old single mother is working to put her
life back on track. When Detective Kuhn
talks with her, she takes him back
to Long Island 1989, where she was a high school
senior swooning for a dreamboat named Manny Pacheco. He was a really attractive
guy and very charming. Had all the right words to say. I fell for him. Fell for him fast. NARRATOR: Maureen recalls an
event early in the relationship where Manny showed up at
her parents' front door in the middle of the night. According to Geoghegan, Pacheco
was in a highly agitated state, shirtless, shoeless, and wearing
only a pair of long johns. He had came to me
completely in hysterics. And he said that his friend's
sister had been killed, and that he wasn't there
for her when she needed him, and that he wished he
was there, and he'd never be able to forgive himself that
he wasn't there to help her. NARRATOR: According
to Geoghegan, Manny clammed up and ran
away when she pressed him for details. One week later, Maureen says,
Manny brought up the subject again-- this time, painting a
much fuller picture. She had been laying in the-- laying in the water with a
log over the back of her head face-down with her
pants pulled down. He describes what
she's wearing that day. He tells her that the person
drowned her because she was screaming too much. These are things that
really weren't in the paper, and he was bringing up things to
her that only the killer would probably know. NARRATOR: Maureen's statement,
while certainly incriminating, does not provide enough
for Kuhn to cuff Pacheco. To do that, the
detective must track down yet another one of
Manny's many ladies, one who can tell police
in detail about the day Manny Pacheco confessed to
the murder of Angela Wong. And he just began to talk
about it like it was what he had for breakfast that morning. [suspenseful music] NARRATOR: Long Island 1984. 11-year-old Angela
Wong was murdered, and a family began its
long wait for justice. I never lost hope. It slowed down a lot. I definitely felt it slowed
down, but I never lost hope. I never said to myself, they're
never going to find him. NARRATOR: Early
on, suspicion fell upon a friend of the
victim named Manny Pacheco. The case, however, stalled
due to a lack of evidence, until Manny began to talk
and the investigation began to heat up. I'd ask-- I said,
did he kill someone? NARRATOR: Maureen Geoghegan
lived with Pacheco for more than a decade. Although Manny never
confessed to Maureen, he spoke of the murder often and
provided her with details that placed him at the crime scene. And she said whenever
he talked about Angela, he would always
get very depressed. At one point, he even
wrote a song about her. He called it, "Oh, Angela." Beautiful girl. 12 years old. He'd go on like that to her. He would refer to her
sometimes as Angela, and he would refer to her
sometimes as his cousin. NARRATOR: On one
occasion, Maureen tells police she
witnessed Manny mention the murder of his so-called
cousin in a threatening way to keep yet another
woman in line. During one of the arguments,
one of where there was-- physical abuse was going
on, he told the other girl that he was going to do to
her the same thing that he did to his cousin. He was very
physically abusive. NARRATOR: Meet Raluca. Like Maureen
Geoghegan before her, Raluca fell victim to
Manny Pacheco's charms and soon found herself on
the wrong side of his fists. Every day it was
just a struggle-- NARRATOR: After one particularly
brutal beating, however, Raluca tells police Pacheco
was overcome with remorse, and his apologies suddenly
morphed into a murder confession. That was the first time he
mentioned Angela and sort of referenced her. And he was kind of like,
well, you know, it was-- I don't know why
I do these tngs. I just-- something
comes over me, and it was like when
I killed my cousin. And he just began to talk about
it like it was what he had for breakfast that morning. NARRATOR: On that occasion,
Raluca tells police Pacheco offered up a
tearful, detailed confession to the murder of Angela Wong. 10 months later, the topic
surfaced again when Raluca tried to leave Manny. This time, according
to the witness, Pacheco's mood was
far more sinister. This time he was using Angela
in a threatening way, you know. I killed my cousin. What makes you think
I won't kill you? NARRATOR: Raluca's statement
provides cold case detectives with enough probable cause to
finally arrest Manny Pacheco. Hoping to hear a confession
from the suspect's own mouth, Detective Kuhn sits down with
Pacheco and a picture of Angela Wong. And I showed him
that picture of Angela. He became very belligerent. I know nothing about her! Why are you asking me about her? And-- to the point where he
stood up a couple of times. He wasn't cuffed in the
room, so we had to tell him, you know, you gotta calm down. You have to sit down, or you're
going to have to be handcuffed. NARRATOR: Pacheco stiff-arms
police and calls for a lawyer. The ladies' man
pleads not guilty and decides to take
his chances in court. [suspenseful music] Nassau County
prosecutor Bob Hayden is a man with his
work cut out for him. Hayden must prove
Manny Pacheco's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt
using only eyewitness testimony and admissions allegedly
made by the defendant. Well, understand that under
the law in New York state, any kind of an admission is
direct evidence, because this is a witness-- the person who committed the
crime-- saying, I did it. NARRATOR: In prepping
for trial, detectives are able to track down two more
women who claim to have heard Manny Pacheco confess to
the murder of Angela Wong. In addition, Angela's
autopsy helps the prosecutor set her time of death at some
point between 4:00 and 5:00 PM. Hayden then cinches the
circumstantial noose with an eyewitness who can place
the defendant and the victim together in close proximity
to the crime scene at approximately 4:30. She had seen Manny Pacheco,
the defendant, and Angela Wong, the victim, walking from between
where the Wong's house was and a gate leading
into the wooded area where Angela's dead body
was eventually found. NARRATOR: In closing statements,
Hayden arrives at motive, casting the defendant as
a rejected Romeo filled with uncontrollable rage. Manny never set
out to rape Angela. Manny believed that
he was going to have consensual sex with Angela. He considered himself
irresistible to young women, and he thought this was
just going to happen. And instead of
going along with it, she was revolted by
what was going on. He had lost sight of the
fact that she was a child. She was only 11. And when she resisted,
he became infuriated. He did lose control of himself. He did lose his temper. And what he did
then is beat her up. And it was then that
he made the decision he was going to have to kill her. He was terrified she was
going to tell her parents. That's a motive. He has to kill her. He chose to take her life
rather than expose himself to punishment. And it takes a very
cold-hearted person to do that, and that's the kind of
person we submit he was. NARRATOR: After only seven
hours of deliberation, a Nassau County jury
agrees with Hayden and finds Manny Pacheco guilty
of the murder of Angela Wong. Because Pacheco was a juvenile
at the time of the crime, he receives a sentence
of nine years to life. I was upset. NARRATOR: For Angela's family,
the sentence seems light, but all are in
agreement that something is better than nothing. I think he got the
maximum sentence, which if that's the best we're
going to get, we got it. NARRATOR: As for
others who may be going through a similar ordeal seeking
justice for someone who's been murdered, Angela's father
offers a closing thought. Never give up. There is a
detective out there. There is evidence out there. There's clues out there. They're going to put
this case together. Call them on a regular
basis, not to haunt them, but to call them on
a regular basis-- on anniversary dates, birthdays,
Christmas, Thanksgiving-- and remind them that we're still
here without our loved ones-- so that these cases will
still be not cold anymore, maybe lukewarm. [suspenseful music] BARBARA BROGLI: The last
thing he said was goodbye and I love you, Mom. See you tonight. And that's the last
time I ever saw him. TIM JOHNSON: He learned
that dead kids don't talk. LARRY NIELSEN:
Seeing the braces-- that bothered me. MARY ANN GALANTE:
There's no blood. There's no witness. There's no smoking gun. PAUL CAPPUCCILLI: I said, that
son of a [bleep] killed Jamey. NARRATOR: In the beach towns
of Southern California, the sun shines early and often. But in the spring
of 1979, the sky is about to darken
for a single mom. Barb Brogli is newly divorced
and spending a few nights in a local motel with her
13-year-old son Jamey. On the morning of April 19,
Barb dresses for work and Jamey hustles off to school. He had his lunch
money and his bus fare and a book bag and
his skateboard. And the last thing he said was
goodbye and I love you, Mom. See you tonight. And that was the last
time I ever saw him. NARRATOR: After work,
Barb returns to the motel to find that Jamey never
made it to school that day. Checking with
Jamey's friends, Barb discovers that her son
is nowhere to be found. Concerned to the point of
panic, Barb calls police, but gets no immediate help. Back then, it was
72 hours before they would take a report. And then they wouldn't
consider them a missing person unless they were
seen being abducted. They were considered runaways. NARRATOR: Three days later,
Jamey's disappearance warrants police attention. Detective Dave Walker
works the case. A lot of times, you know,
you get a case like this, and if there is a
typical runaway where they're gone for a few days,
and then one of their relatives or friends will spot them
and you'll hear about them. NARRATOR: Detective
Walker turns his attention to Jamey's classmates at school,
where stories about Jamey are spreading like wildfire. I'd received several
different scenarios. One of them being that
he'd been kidnapped. Another one was that he'd
merely ran away from home. Another one was he'd been
injured and was in a hospital somewhere. Long story short, nobody had
actually seen any of this. It was all rumors. NARRATOR: Six weeks into the
investigation, Detective Walker becomes convinced of what
a mother knew in her heart after six hours. At that point, I'm thinking
that there's probably foul play involved in the case-- that someone has taken
him against his will. That's based on the fact
that he has not voluntarily contacted any of his
friends or relatives. NARRATOR: The months become
a year, the years a decade. Jamey Trotter has vanished
from the face of the earth. That's the worst part-- is year after year of
looking and not knowing. [police radio chatter] NARRATOR: In January
of 1990, Larry Nielsen works as an investigator for
the Riverside County Sheriff. Late one Sunday afternoon,
Nielsen takes a report from a deputy
responding to a call from a hiker named
James Crummel. Crummel said that he
had found what he thought were human bones because it
was a jaw bone with braces or dental appliances. NARRATOR: The next morning,
Nielsen and his partner follow their hiker
into the wilderness. Well, he brought
us to one location on the side of the hill. onto the ground, Andn and there was a portion of
the skull that was visible. Near that portion of the skull,
there was the upper jaw bone. And a little bit farther away,
we found the lower jaw bone with the braces on it. NARRATOR: Smaller
bones are scattered along the side of the hill. The gravity of the discovery
is realized immediately. Seeing the braces,
my initial reaction was that it was
probably a young person. And that bothered me. Somebody was missing
a son or a daughter. NARRATOR: Police
send the remains to forensic anthropologist
Dr. Robert Hegler. The doctor cannot
name a cause of death, but he does point to the pelvic
bone as a clear identifying factor. He concluded that
we had a female, and it was a young
female, early teens. NARRATOR: Investigators
commence to search for a missing adolescent female. None of their open
cases, however, match the teeth found
in the Ortega Mountains. Eventually, the pile of bones
is marked down as a Jane Doe and set aside. It will be almost five
years before investigators take a second look
at the remains and realize they made a mistake. In the early 1990s,
the state of California begins processing
unidentified human remains through a new computer database
called MUPS, or Missing Unidentified Persons System. Debbie, take a
look at these again. NARRATOR: Dr. Judy Suchey is
a forensic anthropologists working on the project from
her lab at Cal State Fullerton. Where did we put that ilium? NARRATOR: In the
summer of 1995, she comes across the remains
found in the Ortega Mountains along with a report classifying
the bones as female. I was rather surprised that
he had tried to determine a sex. This particular
individual was 10 to 12, 13, in that vicinity, which
is virtually impossible to sex accurately. NARRATOR: Reading
deeper into the report, Dr. Suchey sees that
sex was determined using a pelvic measurement
system known as the Weaver method-- a method that is, perhaps,
less than reliable. And this particular method
was running around 80%, which isn't too good. An 80% method, I would
not use in forensic cases. And I actually talked to
Dr. Weaver and said, well, would you use this method
in a forensic case? And he said, no, I
would only use it for archaeological material
or maybe not at all. So he was the first to say
it's an interesting method, but not too reliable. NARRATOR: Dr. Suchey
reclassifies the bones with a sex of undetermined
and kicks them back to Riverside County. Investigators
expand their search to include girls and
boys with braces. Almost immediately,
they get a hit. When we were able to enter
the correct identification into the MUP system,
we immediately got a hit out of Orange
County on Jamey Trotter. NARRATOR: Jamey's
dental records are sent to Dr. Doug
Wyler for comparison with the unidentified remains. Right here, he
has a small filling. NARRATOR: In most cases, dental
records can be conclusive. DOUG WYLER: These
are the post-mortem. NARRATOR: But in this case,
Wyler has only parts of the jaw and teeth for comparison. You couldn't tell
anything definitive. You couldn't tell if
it was him for certain, but you could not eliminate him. NARRATOR: Unable
to match up teeth, Dr. Wyler turns to the braces. A practicing dentist, Wyler is
sensitive to certain signature characteristics that could
distinguish one doctor's work from another. As I looked at the
teeth and the braces, I immediately knew that
I did not do the work. And so it hit me
that his orthodontist would know whether that
was his work or not. NARRATOR: Wyler tracks down
Jamey Trotter's orthodontist-- and, indeed, the doctor
recognizes his own handiwork. Jamey's family
provides DNA samples, and forensic testing confirms
what a dentist already suspects. The remains found in the Ortega
Mountains are in fact Jamey Trotter's. As a parent, I really
wanted to find Jamey. NARRATOR: Paul Cappuccilli
is a cop as well as a father. With Trotter's remains
now identified, he takes up the hunt
for the boy's killer. We closed one chapter
on this incident because now we had him. But we also got a new
chapter in that we didn't know how he got there. NARRATOR: Jamey's bones
provide nary a clue as to how the boy died. That is, until one night
when Cappuccilli awakens from a sound sleep with the
name of a suspect on the tip of his tongue. Middle of the night, I
woke up, just sat straight up in bed. And I said, that son of
a bitch killed Jamey. [suspenseful music] NARRATOR: In 1979,
13-year-old Jamey Trotter heads off to school and is
never seen or heard from again. 11 years later,
the boy's bones are discovered by a hiker some
50 miles away in the Ortega Mountains. What in the world
is he doing out there? NARRATOR: For Detective
Paul Cappuccilli, the circumstances of Jamey's
death remain a mystery. We had no idea how he died. There wasn't enough of his
remains to tell us how he died. NARRATOR: For six
years, Jamey's case sits in investigative
limbo until fate takes a hand, guiding
a cop and a killer to a meeting at the crossroads
of memory and murder. It's a slow morning in 1996,
and Costa Mesa detective Paul Cappuccilli is working patrol. As the officer cruises
down Hamilton Street, he notices the car
in front of him has an expired registration. Cappuccilli hits his flashers
and initiates a routine traffic stop. He got out of the car and
gave me his driver's license. And as I'm writing him
this ticket, I looked at it and I said to him, Mr.
Crummel, how do I know you? And he says, we
never met before. NARRATOR: The two began talking,
and Cappuccilli discovers that Mr. Crummel is James
Crummel, the same James Crummel who discovered Jamey Trotter's
bones while hiking some six years earlier. And I thought,
what a coincidence. This is incredible. NARRATOR: Coincidence
aside, there is something else about Crummel
that stirs the detective-- something that
doesn't sit right. And I was thinking about
that car stop all day long. And I'm thinking, I
know him from someplace. How in the world do I know him? NARRATOR: When Cappuccilli gets
back to police headquarters, he does a little digging and
discovers the department had actually investigated
Crummel in 1982 on a child molestation charge. When I saw his name in
there and that arrest, it all came back to me. I remembered in 1982 that I ran
a records check on Mr. Crummel and learned that he had
been arrested in Wisconsin for attempted murder
on a child, and he had been arrested for murder
of a child in Arizona. NARRATOR: Good cops
don't like coincidences, and Paul Cappuccilli
is no exception. A couple of days later,
middle of the night, I woke up, just sat straight up in bed. And I said, that son of
a bitch killed Jamey. NARRATOR: The next day,
Cappuccilli is on the line to Riverside County
Sheriff's Department. The topic of conversation-- James Crummel. Automatically, we make him a
person of interest in the case. NARRATOR: Investigator Tim
Johnson and Riverside County Deputy DA Bill Mitchell dig into
James Crummel's criminal past. There they find a timeline that
weaves, for them, a history of murder. What we looked at
is his prior crimes. We looked to see were there
any similarities there. And we were actually
shocked to find that there were many, many similarities. NARRATOR: February 1967. A boy lies dead in the dust
of Pima County, Arizona. James Crummel,
then 23 years old, is a suspect, but skips town
before things get too hot. Six months later in
Mequon, Wisconsin, a young boy hitchhikes
home from football practice and is picked up by a
man in a laundry truck-- a man named Crummel. He was driven to a wooded area
on the shores of Lake Michigan, tied up, sexually assaulted. This boy, he beat over the head
and then strangled and left for dead. NARRATOR: The boy, however,
doesn't die and IDs Crummel, who does five
years for the assault and is released on parole. From his Wisconsin conviction,
however, the child molester takes an important lesson. He learned that
dead kids don't talk. He learned that the next time
this happens, that he's going to make sure he kills the kid. NARRATOR: By 1979,
Crummel finds his way to Costa Mesa, California,
where he lives under an alias just a few blocks away from
what cold case detectives now believe was his next victim,
13-year-old Jamey Trotter. And that address-- which I didn't know personally--
but when I started looking at a map and then I
later drove out there, was right down the street from
where Jamey Trotter lived, and was actually on the same
side of the street where he would have had to walk to go
to his school that morning. That means that these two
people had crossed paths within a few feet of each
other, their residences. NARRATOR: The timeline helps
cold case detectives place Crummel within a few
blocks of Trotter at the time of the
boy's death in 1979. Nine years later,
after a second stretch in prison for the
Arizona crime, Crummel is again released into
society and eventually hikes into the Ortega Mountains, where
he discovers Trotter's bones. For investigators, it is
all too much coincidence to believe that James Crummel
is anything but Jamey Trotter's killer. Problem is, they still
have to prove it. To do that, they decide
to talk to their suspect and see if he makes a mistake. [suspenseful music] On January 23, 1997,
investigators get Jim Crummel on the telephone. [phone ringing] The approach is casual. Just a routine follow-up to
his discovery of Jamey's bones. JAMES CRUMMEL (ON PHONE): Hello? He's an experienced criminal,
and he wasn't the type of person that you could bring
in the office and interview. He's going to deny, deny. He's not going to come. He knows he doesn't have to. He's going to get a lawyer. He's not going to talk to you. So we wanted to kind
of make an ally of him and try to set up
a meeting with him to have him take me back
up to the crime scene. TIM JOHNSON (ON
PHONE): So we thought of calling you and asking if you
could maybe meet us up there, or meet us somewhere, and
point the area out to us again. JAMES CRUMMEL (ON
PHONE): I wouldn't even have any idea where it was. TIM JOHNSON (ON PHONE): No? JAMES CRUMMEL (ON PHONE):
It's been so long ago, I don't even remember
where it was-- NARRATOR: Crummel declines to
meet police in the mountains and seeks to disassociate
himself completely with the location
of Jamey's remains. JAMES CRUMMEL (ON PHONE): It was
somewhere right along in there, but I really couldn't
tell you exactly. TIM JOHNSON (ON
PHONE): That's too bad. NARRATOR: Cold case
detectives don't buy a word of Crummel's story. In fact, they believe
the hills might have tremendous significance
for a man they now consider a likely serial killer. Investigator Johnson
tracks down a former lover of Jim, a man we'll call
John, who tells the detective about his relationship
with Crummel, including a number
of sexual adventures in the great outdoors. It was strange that every time
they went to a location, Jim would want to have sex
with him at that location. There was a place where
Jim enjoyed having sex up there in the mountains. So I took him in towards
the area where we knew that Jamey's body was found. And as we hiked into the
area, he pointed out and said, I've been here before with Jim. NARRATOR: It is the last link
in a circumstantial chain of murder stretching
back three decades. It's too incredible
to be a coincidence. There's no way that lightning
can strike that many times on one person. REPORTER: Neighbors
cheered when police came up and suddenly arrested convicted
sex offender James Lee Crummel in front of his Newport
Beach condominium today. NARRATOR: On May 30,
1997, James Crummel gets a visit from
police and is arrested for child molestation-- charges that are subsequently
expanded to include the murder of Jamey Trotter. REPORTER: Meantime, Crummel's
Newport Beach neighbors actually broke out champagne
to celebrate his arrest. GROUP: To the safety
of our children! Crummel was finally
getting what he deserved. I mean, the community, everybody
knew, finally, who he was and what he was. He could no longer
hide behind that facade of being a respectable
member of the community. His past was finally
coming to light. NARRATOR: The task
of representing James Crummel falls to Riverside
County public defender Mary Ann Galante. Her strategy is simple-- highlight what she sees is
a major, fundamental flaw in the state's case. This is not a case where
there was any physical evidence at all linking
Crummel to the crime. All they're doing
is mad-dogging-- There's no blood. There's no witness. There's no smoking gun. There is no physical evidence. NARRATOR: Galante is right. What the state does have,
however, is a damning set of circumstances-- perhaps most telling, the
defendant's own criminal past. The law, the evidence
code, allows you to consider the defendant's prior crimes
to even actually prove what they call the corpus
delicti, or the body of the crime. And we can infer from his prior
crimes and the types of sex acts that he committed against
those other boys what he did to Jamey. NARRATOR: After four
weeks of testimony and four days of deliberation,
the jury agrees with Mitchell and finds Crummel guilty for
the murder of Jamey Trotter. At the penalty
phase of the trial, the state asks that
Crummel be executed. And I told the jury from
the opening statement on, you know what he did,
you know why he did it, and you know what he deserves. There is no more heinous
crime, no one more deserving of the death penalty, than
someone like James Crummel. NARRATOR: On June 7, 2004, a
judge sentences James Crummel to die by lethal injection. Well, I don't think you ever
feel justice is done when it takes the life of a loved one. NARRATOR: A simple
verdict of guilty does nothing to erase the fact
that Barb Brogli's son is dead. There is, however,
a certain comfort in knowing that the larger
evil of James Crummel, drifting through life,
looking for children to rape and to kill, is no
longer a reality-- that he will die
either in his jail cell or at the wrong end of
an executioner's needle. After the judge read
over all those things that he had done over the
years, and then Jamey, it was just like, he
deserves whatever he gets. That's my opinion. NARRATOR: And so
the case is closed, yet one mystery lingers. Why did James Crummel
pose as a hiker and report the discovery
of Jamey Trotter's bones to police? When you talk to people who
study these people's minds, they'll tell you that a
lot of times these guys will interject themselves
into the investigation. They want to know
what's going on. They can't leave it alone. Some of them like the attention. He led us to the bones
on his 45th birthday. I believe that he was giving
us, or giving himself, a birthday present by watching
our reaction to discovering his work and us not being
able to do anything about it. I think he got a
good laugh at us. NARRATOR: Whatever the reasons,
it remains, to this day, a secret locked within the
mind of a serial killer. [suspenseful music]
