Mysterious Set of BONES Puts Police on Murderer's Trail (S4, E4) | Cold Case Files | Full Episode

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[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]
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Channel: A&E
Views: 89,954
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Keywords: a&e, aetv, a&e tv, ae, a&e television, a&e shows, a and e, a+e, the first 48, crime, true crime, crime investigation, solving crime, police, detectives, police procedure, cold case files, cold case, murder investigation, true crime show, cold case files new episodes, watch cold case files, Mysterious, Set of BONES, Police on Murderer's Trail, season four, episode four, season 4 episode 4 Cold Case Files, season four episode four, 11-year-old girl, detectives who reopen cold cases
Id: prrYwa4vTQQ
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Length: 44min 56sec (2696 seconds)
Published: Sun Dec 31 2023
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