Police Solve 20-YEAR-Old Murder of Beauty Queen (S4, E3) | Cold Case Files | Full Episode

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[audio logo] The victim's own sock was used to strangle her. TRENT SPROLES: As she tighten her grip on something, the sock is pulling. It's getting tighter tighter. She was clenching her fist. Her skin cells and cells are being rubbed off onto the fabric of the sock. And it's embedded in the fabric. BRENDA SMITH: DNA is pretty hardy material. And it's going to-- and it's going to last a lengthy period of time. TRENT SPROLES: DNA is a fascinating thing. It never goes away. [audio logo] NARRATOR: Deep in the Mojave Desert, Route 14 Ramble South, into the one-stoplight town of Rosamond, California, here, every face is familiar. And everyone knows Tana Woolley, a 20-year old beauty queen, A student, and quintessential girl next door. On a Wednesday morning, Tana's mother, Helen, takes a call about her daughter. It was between, I think, 9:30 and 10:00. And her boss, Patty April, called me and said that Tana had not come to work. NARRATOR: Helen Woolley is a mother who knows her daughter and knows even as she hangs up the phone, that something is very wrong. Helen gets into her car and heads over to Tana's apartment. When I pulled up, her car was there. I opened the door. And the first thing I saw was her. And I didn't go any further. NARRATOR: Tana Woolley's body hangs over the side of her bed. She is naked from the waist down, has one blue sock on her foot, and the other wrapped around her neck. Detectives bagged the victim's clothes and bedding and send the body to the local morgue. There, the cause of death is officially determined to be strangulation. Semen is recovered, confirming initial suspicions of a sexual assault. In 1978, however, nothing further can be done with the forensic evidence. Meanwhile, a father waits for someone to explain to him what happened to his daughter. Do you have any idea who it is? And when they're saying no, we don't, then you are wondering, well, where are you going to go with this if there's no witnesses, there's no real suspects? All you're looking for is to find the guy that would do something like this. NARRATOR: Days slipped by. And the small town of Rosamond speculates about who might want Tana Woolley dead. Meanwhile, a family buries their daughter and waits for an answer. Two weeks after their daughter's murder, the Woolley family believes the investigation has already gone sideways. Kern County detectives are stretched thin. And leads are as dry as the desert air. The detective that came to the house was just so overloaded that we felt like it was never going to go anywhere. We didn't feel that he was going to be able to put all of this effort into Tana's case. So that's why I told Helen, we need to get some help here. [audio logo] NARRATOR: Help comes in the form of a private eye named Lew McNatt who promises the Woolley family he will take a second look at their daughter's murder. McNatt starts with a visit to Tana Woolley's apartment complex. I started from each of the apartments interviewing the people who resided at the apartments, attempting to find out if they heard anything in the first place; if they did, what they heard. And then did one further and tell me what they've seen prior to the time of the murder. NARRATOR: 30 apartments in all, McNatt knocks on each door and chats up the residents. The private investigator is looking for someone who stands out-- a loner, perhaps, who had the opportunity to stalk Tana Woolley, pick his moment, make his move. Several residents finger one person in particular-- a neighbor named Larry Hazlett. The 31-year-old is known in the complex as the local creep. Even better for McNatt, Larry Hazlett lives in apartment number 5, just 10 feet away from Tana Woolley's bedroom window. LEW MCNATT: His front door faced the other way from her apartment. But the window was right there was a big window. So he could sit there and watch by the hour. And he has a lot of time to spend and look. You see? That's the bad part. And since she was such a beautiful girl, this to him was probably a pinnacle for him. And so I think that's why he watched her so much. NARRATOR: McNatt's theory gained some traction when Tana's boyfriend, Ricky Rush discloses that Tana had expressed some concerns about the man in apartment number 5. She had mentioned to Rick, you know, that this guy would be staring at her. And she felt kind of uneasy. Tana was very concerned because they watched her all the time when she took the garbage out, when she went out of the apartment. Anywhere she went, there was always somebody watching her. So she became quite concerned. NARRATOR: The pieces are beginning to fit, the theory of murder sharpening into focus. It is a theory that begins at home with a young woman and ends with her neighbor just a few doors away. LEW MCNATT: It was like a funnel situation. We have all these people here talking and giving me bits of information. And as it funnels down, somebody comes out down here to the bottom of the funnel. And it happened to be him. NARRATOR: Five months after Tana Woolley's death, Larry Hazlett slips quietly out of town, out of the reach of police, and out of the reach of Lew McNatt. I developed a lot of people who gave me information during my period of time of investigation. And so I asked them. You know, I go around and say, well, have you seen Hazlett now? When was the last time you saw him? Or maybe two weeks ago, maybe a month ago. And the synopsis was that he just wasn't there. He was gone. And once he's gone, there's nothing else to do. NARRATOR: The private investigator feels he has identified Tana Woolley's killer but is powerless to do anything about it. It's always frustrating when you can't pin down especially a murder and especially if somebody you thought a great deal of. It's difficult. NARRATOR: The worst part of McNatt's job, trying to explain the hard truth of things to the victim's family. He told us, you know, from about the fifth or sixth day who it was-- or he was pretty sure who it was. But there was no evidence. They could not get any evidence of him. NARRATOR: In time, the investigation into Tana Woolley's murder finds its way into the cold files, her death forgotten by all, save a precious few. I never lost hope. There was times when I'd think, oh, my gosh, it's not going anywhere. But I always felt like someday-- I just knew someday it would. As long as everybody believes that there is hope, you know, then you can press on. If we had anybody that was negative, then it would probably have discouraged all of us. But we never got to that point. NARRATOR: For the Woolley family, the wait is a long one, more than 20 years, until a new generation of detectives opens up an old file and finds the clue that everyone missed. I think that's when the light bulb came on, eureka moment, this is my guy. At least, he's as good as any that I got right now. NARRATOR: In the fall of 1978, Tana Woolley is found raped and strangled with her own sock inside her apartment. The killer leaves semen behind but no other clues as to his identity. Tana Woolley's family hires a private investigator named Lew McNatt who suspects a neighbor named Larry Hazlett. With no hard evidence and no witnesses, however, the case goes cold. For 20 years, Helen and Bill Woolley wait for police to reopen the case and find their daughter's killer. Helen would call I know on the average once a month and talk to either one of the detectives, or they'd stop by. The problem that we had is there was a turnover of detectives on this case. So each new detective that was given the case would have to start off from square one. [audio logo] NARRATOR: In 1999, the torch is passed to a new generation. And Tana's sister Taryn begins to call police. Like her parents, Taryn is polite but insistent that detectives take up Tana's case and begin to work it again. I didn't feel like that they should have to go through this all over again being the parents. So I took it. I just said, I have to do this. Every month, I'll call until they tell me there's-- you know, we can do no more. NARRATOR: For three months, Taryn calls. Until finally, she gets a sergeant named Chris Speer on the other end of the line. The investigator promises to take a look into Tana's file. I look through it. And, unfortunately, the 1970s, the documentation about how an investigator got from point A to point B wasn't as thorough as we currently do. So there were some scraps of information in the case file that, you know, I considered clues or potential clues left to me by the prior investigator. NARRATOR: Among the pieces of evidence is a request for fingerprints from a man named Larry Hazlett, the same Larry Hazlett developed as a suspect by the Woolley family's private investigator 20 years earlier. Speer is not sure why the original investigators wanted Hazlett's prints and decides to run a background check. What he gets back is a 20-year rap sheet, including four arrests for rape. I think that was when the light bulb came on, the eureka moment, this is my guy. Or at least, he's as good as any that I got right now. NARRATOR: Hazlett is a registered sex offender living in Sacramento. Speer pulls his address and heads into the city for a sit-down with his suspect. [audio logo] Larry Hazlett lives a quiet life on a quiet street, his neighbors never suspecting Hazlett is also a convicted sex offender. On October 5, Sergeant Speer knocks on Hazlett's front door armed with a search warrant for his DNA. He voluntarily surrendered the samples and just said, here you go. Didn't know her. I'll be glad to help you in the future. Goodbye. NARRATOR: Speer can only assume one of two things. Either Larry Hazlett is entirely innocent. Or he has gotten away with so much crime in his life that he thinks he can't be caught. It's worked 20 years ago. Be somewhat cooperative and just deny it, and they'll leave me alone for another 20 years. NARRATOR: Speer returns to Bakersfield with samples in hand, hopeful science can tell him if Larry Hazlett is an ex-con gone straight or a rapist and a killer. [audio logo] In 2000, DNA analyst Brenda Smith sifts through evidence more than 20 years old. She begins with semen pulled from Tana Woolley's body. Unfortunately, it's too degraded for DNA testing. Smith then turns to bags of clothing and bedding collected at the crime scene. Using an alternate light source, Smith scans the items for stains that might indicate bodily fluids. I found some small circular stains, kind of yellowish-looking stains towards the top of the bedspread. I did screen portions of a couple of those areas. And they did screen positive for semen. I just kind of got excited and had a gut feeling about those stains from the very beginning. NARRATOR: Smith isolates the stains, extracts a genetic profile, and compares it to the DNA signature of Larry Hazlett. BRENDA SMITH: It ended up matching Hazlett. I've never been more excited on-- probably on any of the other cases that I've looked at in the time that I've been doing DNA. I-- you know, I think I almost hyperventilated on that one. [laughs] NARRATOR: The match is as good as it gets with an occurrence frequency of 1 in 126 billion. Smith puts a call in to Kern County Homicide. The Tana Woolley case is in play with a suspect waiting to be arrested. Detectives Joe Hicks and Scott Jelletich are given the job of arresting and interrogating Larry Hazlett. Despite the DNA match, the two quickly realize the case against Hazlett is far from certain. SCOTT JELLETICH: We were concerned that a defense of his could be his claim that it was consensual. And that was why his semen would be on her bedspread. Our intent to obtain a statement from him is to-- for court purposes, lock him in to what it-- what does he have to say happened there. Whatever he could possibly use as a defense later in a court trial, we wanted to establish at that interview. NARRATOR: At a little after 2:00 PM, the detectives slowed to a stop in front of Hazlett's home. Once again, Hazlett appears eager to talk and to cooperate. Detectives sit down at his kitchen table, cue up the tape recorder, and begin to ask about Tana Woolley's rape and murder. NARRATOR: The detectives have what they came for-- a statement from Hazlett they can prove to be a lie. Hicks then takes the next step-- confronting Hazlett with the DNA match. My first reaction-- Mr. Hazlett's quite a large man-- was that I wanted to calm him down and get him set back down at the table because I didn't want to have some altercation inside of his house. NARRATOR: Hazlett is arrested and charged with first-degree murder. At the same time, a mother gets the call she has been waiting 24 years to receive. It was really ironic. I was at the cemetery. And when I got the call, I was just putting the flowers. And I just told her all the little angels could dance-- [laughs] --dance in heaven, you know? NARRATOR: Helen Woolley believes the nightmare has come to an end. Turns out, she is wrong as Larry Hazlett enters a plea of innocent. And prosecutors realize that despite their DNA match, there is still a very large hole in their case. In the fall of 1978, Tana Woolley was found raped and murdered inside her apartment. 24 years later, bodily fluids are discovered on bedsheets found at the crime scene. And a DNA profile is developed. That profile is then matched to Tana Woolley's next door neighbor, a convicted sex offender named Larry Hazlett. NARRATOR: Hazlett claims the DNA evidence against him is a plant. An arrest warrant is issued, and a date set for trial. [audio logo] Here's my chance. NARRATOR: Ed Jagels has been prosecuting cases for almost three decades. In December of 2002, he takes up the Hazlett case and immediately identifies a problem. Defendant could claim that he had an affair with the victim, which they were keeping quiet for various reasons, and that he had certainly seen her. But the last time he'd seen her, she was fine, and he had no idea what happened subsequently. NARRATOR: Jagels feels he needs more evidence before proceeding to trial. He enlists the help of investigator Trent Sproles. Together, the two start digging into Larry Hazlett's past. There's an unbelievably lucky serial rapist. We found four instances in which he had committed rape, three of them prior to this incident and one subsequent. He got out of every one of them. You had to actually go back 1-- 31 years and retrace where they moved, where they lived, what their names were. One was married four different times. So I had four prior names. NARRATOR: Over a period of months, Trent Sproles tracks each of the women. None of them had ever met each other. Each, however, tells the same story about Larry Hazlett. TRENT SPROLES: He would come across very polite, very friendly. And then when he had them alone, he was like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde effect. One of the women he bit so severely she still has the scars on her to show. NARRATOR: All four of the women had reported the attack at the time it happened and never got their day in court. Three decades later, they are, at first, reluctant to come forward. Well, most of them, at first, didn't want to discuss it, which I understood. But once they understood the severity of the case and that this man had actually murdered someone, a young female, then there is some guilt involved, where they thought if they would have continued with their case back 30-some years ago and prosecuted this man, then maybe this young woman may not have died. NARRATOR: All four finally agreed to testify. Each will provide details that will paint Larry Hazlett as a serial rapist. Ed Jagels, however, isn't done. In preparing for trial, he has paid a visit to the Kern County Forensic Lab to talk about a young girl's blue sock. [audio logo] DNA analyst Brenda Smith knows the Tana Woolley case well. She has already isolated bodily fluid stains on the victim's bedspread and linked them to Larry Hazlett. Now, Ed Jagels asks her to examine the sock used to strangle the victim. Because it was a ligature, it would have had to have been held pretty tightly and for a little bit of a lengthy time. There was at least a potential that some skin cells from the individual's hands could have slipped off onto the sock. NARRATOR: Using a single-edged razor, Smith scrapes the topmost layer of material off Tana Woolley's sock. The bits of fuzz are then placed into a test tube and tested. Small amounts of human DNA are determined to be present. Smith isolates the genetic strands and develops a partial profile. I was pretty excited that I got anything off the sock, you know, at all. I just-- I-- you know, it's 50/50 proposition in my mind. NARRATOR: The partial profile is consistent with Larry Hazlett, not a full genetic match, but enough to undermine any contention that Hazlett's DNA also found on the victim's bedsheet was the result of a consensual sexual relationship. With the addition of this piece of evidence, which was the DNA extracted from the ligature from the actual sock that was used to strangle her, that story wouldn't hold any water anymore. [audio logo] NARRATOR: On June 10, Ed Jagels presents his case to a jury. After a week of testimony and an hour and a half of deliberation, the panel returns a verdict. Larry Hazlett is found guilty of murder. A month later, he is sentenced. MAN 1: Do you hereby determine that the penalty shall be death? MAN 2: Yes. NARRATOR: Helen Woolley watches as the man who raped and killed her daughter is taken away to await his own death by lethal injection. HELEN WOOLLEY: I just wanted to tell him what he robbed me of. I probably would have said he was a monster, you know? And just his cockiness when he left court just irritated me. You know, he just gave us that look through his shoulders at us, like, are you happy now? And yeah, we were very happy. NARRATOR: While no death sentence will bring Tana back, the Woolley family take some comfort in knowing their phone calls kept this case alive, and that persistence sometimes has its own rewards. It's one of those things that we hope that other people that are watching your program will realize that whatever they do, they can't give up. They need to keep pressing the law enforcement, which my family did. And it paid off. I-- and I knew down deep in my heart that justice would prevail. [audio logo] JIM MCGINN: As he was getting out of the car, he gives the van a very hard eyeball. You don't want to just run out and arrest the person because you want to know what their background is. Told Sergeant Guido bend down like she was tying her shoe, pick up that cigarette butt. KEVIN MCCARTHY: This is a person that is never going to accept responsibility for what he did and deserves, as far as I'm concerned, absolutely no mercy. [audio logo] NARRATOR: Winter in Oceanside New York, darkness comes early. The moon, cold, and the city streets mostly empty. At around 6:30 PM, a patrol car is taking the corner at Lawson Boulevard when its radio crackles to life. DISPATCHER: [inaudible] NARRATOR: A dead body discovered by a family member inside a local home. Officers Ed Carter and Otto Kohlmier hit the flashers and roll to 3412 Ocean Harbor Drive, home of 41-year-old Susan Eigen. What we saw was one hysterical person, another woman off to-- you know, in the kitchen kind of out of it and a man that was fairly calm for the situation who told us that someone was dead upstairs. OTTO KOHLMIER: It was Susan Eigen laying in the doorway between the bedroom and the hall. She was in a fetal position. She had a look like a collar made out of a belt around her neck. NARRATOR: Police walk across the hallway and into the master bedroom, where they discover Susan's son, 17-year-old Richard, also dead. ED CARTER: It was down to a three-step type entranceway up to the master bed. And he was bound by the wrists to the railing. And he was suffocated and strangled. He had wires around his neck and plastic bag over his head. And the bag was covered by a gray coat. NARRATOR: Kohlmier and Carter secure the house and call in backup. Detective Herb Daub arrives and begins to work the scene. HERB DAUB: One of the bedrooms, we found blood on one of the beds. Of course, she was found in a hallway outside the bedroom. And then, of course, there was a scene in the bedroom. So there was activity in at least three different places. NARRATOR: Blood splatter is collected off a bedsheet near Susan Eigen's body. Forensics also collects hair strands from the bandanna used to strangle Susan Eigen. One latent print is lifted off the plastic bag used to suffocate Richard Eigen. And a single unknown print is lifted off a bank receipt found in Susan Eigen's purse. The evidence is tagged and sent downtown for processing. Meanwhile, detectives take note of the overall condition of the house, specifically several dresser drawers pulled open and a pocketbook upturned. It appears to have been a burglary gone bad. That was probably our first theory. NARRATOR: Detectives speculate the intruder encountered Susan Eigen inside the house. And a simple burglary turned into rape then murder. As for 17-year-old Richard, detectives believe he came home at the wrong time, thereby sealing his fate. My theory is that he walked in while his mother was being beaten, raped, or attacked or whatever. And may be screaming, maybe he's yelling, put a bag over his head to quiet him. Now, the kid's still yelling. Or he could see his face through the bag. He put the coat over top of him to muffle the sounds. And then he went back and did whatever he had to do with Mrs. Eigen and, eventually, murdering her. NARRATOR: The theory plays pretty well. Now, detectives need some facts to make it stand up. They begin with a trip to the crime lab where evidence from the scene is getting a careful once-over. [audio logo] In 1984, DNA is nothing but a theory. The heavy lifting of criminal forensics most often done inside the fingerprint division. In August, Detective Charlie Costello is given latent lifts from the Eigen crime scene-- one from the bag tied over Richard Eigen's head and one from the bank receipt pulled out of Susan Eigen's purse. Police believe that the prints belong to their killer. CHARLIE COSTELLO: The best print of the three was the print on the bank receipt. It was-- you could see pattern area in the print on the bank receipt. Whereas the other two prints that we had on the case, there was very little pattern area that could visually be seen. NARRATOR: Costello initially runs the prints through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System or AFIS but fails to come up with a match. Detectives then begin to collect prints from locals with a history of burglary, hoping they might get lucky. And we started looking into burglary patterns in the neighborhood, people that had been involved in the police and the general area. Our hope early on was that the fingerprint evidence would lead us to a particular person. Any prints that I saw on my-- that came across my desk on other cases I was working on, if it had a similar pattern to the print that I knew was on the Eigen case, I would compare the Eigen print against that case. NARRATOR: Month after month, Nassau County detectives bring in possible suspect prints. Month after month, Charlie Costello pulls out his glass, takes a look, and shakes his head no. Almost a year after the Eigens were first found murdered, homicide is running out of prints to run. And the investigation goes cold. It was certainly my hope and everyone else's hope at that time, because the other leads had sort of gone cold, that somehow, we'd be able to identify the individual that committed those crimes. I was going to do everything I could to identify the individual that kill those people. [audio logo] NARRATOR: Almost two decades have passed, and Charlie Costello is still at it, working with a fingerprint pattern he now has memorized, still hoping to find its match. On January 22, 2002, Costello runs the print another time through AFIS. This time, he registers a hit. I got the return back. It was chilling because I knew right then and there I had him. NARRATOR: Costello matches the Eigen lift to prints submitted on a school bus driver application. The applicant's name-- Louis Telese. Costello gets on the phone to homicide and cold case detective, Jim McGinn. JIM MCGINN: I had just finished reviewing the entire case. And we were going to try and form a game plan when Detective Costello came to us with the fingerprint hit. And naturally, that sent us in a specific direction. NARRATOR: Louis Telese is 42 years old with a record for drug possession. Cold case detectives are interested but not yet ready to move on their suspect. Instead, they decide to find out a little bit more about the would-be bus driver. They set up a stakeout in an unmarked van outside his house and are in place less than an hour when the operation begins to go sideways. He then comes out of the house walking his dog. Unbeknownst to us, he had called the police on us. NARRATOR: In 1984, Susan Eigen and her son Richard were murdered inside their Nassau County home. 18 years later, prints from the crime scene have been matched to a bus driver application submitted by a man named Louis Telese. For cold case detectives, the print match is good news but not nearly enough to support a case for murder. When you get a fingerprint in, you don't want to just run out and arrest the person because you want to know what their background is. Is there any reasonable explanation for his prints to be there? NARRATOR: McGinn orders bedsheets stained with blood and found at the crime scene pulled from the storage and sends them to the Forensic Evidence Bureau. The investigators hope new technology might provide a second forensic link to their suspect. [audio logo] In a darkened corner of the Forensic Evidence Bureau, Detective Kevin McCarthy examines bedsheets from the Eigen crime scene. At first blush, the sheet appears to be of little evidentiary value, containing only the blood of murder victim Susan Eigen. McCarthy, however, views the sheet literally in a different light. Using an ultraviolet beam, McCarthy identifies what appear to be bodily fluid stains invisible to the human eye. McCarthy isolates a sample and runs chemical tests to see what it is. KEVIN MCCARTHY: There was definitely urine staining on the bedding. And in this instance, the urine staining might have-- also have seminal fluid in it. NARRATOR: The analyst is able to extract a partial DNA profile from the stain. Cold case detectives are anxious to compare it against their suspect. But first, they need to get a sample of his DNA. To do that, investigators decide to go undercover. [audio logo] On March 15, 2002, Detective Jim McGinn sits in the back of an unmarked van, just a few doors down from the home of Louis Telese. Parked a surveillance van several houses down the block here so that the back of the van was facing Louis Telese's house. McGinn is trying to get a handle on Telese's daily routine, hoping, eventually, to recover a discarded sample of the suspect's DNA. Police makes his first appearance at 7:00 AM, almost immediately McGinn senses a problem. JIM MCGINN: And as he was getting out of the car, he gives the van a very-- what we call a very hard eyeball. He then comes out of the house walking his dog. Unbeknownst to us, he had called the police on us. NARRATOR: The squad car that shows up knows nothing about the undercover surveillance and stops directly in front of the van. JIM MCGINN: We were sitting in the back of the van just holding our breath, hoping that the police would notice that there's somebody in the van because we knew Louis Telese was on the street. And if we had come out and talk to the local cops, it would have kind of blown everything. NARRATOR: Eventually, the patrol car leaves. McGinn, however, is forced to pull the plug on his undercover operation after a single day. The team, however, does pick up one valuable piece of information. The major thing that we learned about him was that he was a smoker. That was the one thing that we know. So we always felt if we needed a DNA sample, that maybe somehow we'd be able to get a cigarette butt from him. NARRATOR: Two weeks after the aborted surveillance, Louis Telese again changes the dynamics of the investigation. The suspect puts his home up for sale, sparking fears he might be ready to flee the area. If cold case detectives are going to get a DNA sample, they need to move quickly. [audio logo] Detective Tony Graziano works undercover for the Nassau County Police Department. On May 10, he is given the job of obtaining a covert sample of Louis Telese's DNA. We devised a plan where I would go to Louis Telese's home with Detective Sergeant Lucy Guido posing as my wife. And we would be prospective purchasers of the home. NARRATOR: At 11:00 AM, Graziano and Guido begin a walk-through of Telese's home. Graziano immediately works on building a rapport with Telese. TONY GRAZIANO: I knew I was going to approach him like Tony from the Bronx is going to be Louis from Brooklyn. And basically, I knew I connected with him. We were talking like two, you know, city guys. We were fast buddies. NARRATOR: Graziano walks through the house with Telese and out onto the street. There, the suspect lights up and eventually drops his cigarette butt to the ground. Graziano's partner, Lucy Guido moves in to collect the sample. They were both on the street. And I was back on the driveway. And when I saw Telese walk back towards the lawn, Detective Graziano pretty much gave me, like, the sign, come over by me. Told Sergeant Guido to bend down like she was tying her shoe and pick up that cigarette butt because I had seen Louis take it from his hand, throw it directly to the ground. So I had the continuity that that's directly evidence from him. NARRATOR: Guido hands the butt to Graziano, who slips it into an evidence bag. The couple says goodbye to Louis Telese and heads directly to the police crime lab. Saliva and epithelial cells from the filter are isolated and stripped of their DNA. The profilers then compared against DNA found at the Eigen crime scene. As cold case detectives suspected, Louis Telese is a match. On June 5, 2002, Nassau County detectives arrest Louis Telese and take him downtown for questioning. [audio logo] Inside an interview room, Detective Jim McGinn questions Louis Telese about the Eigen double homicide. At first, Telese claims he doesn't know the Eigen family. Then McGinn tells him about the forensic evidence. Each time that we confronted him with that, you know, his head would go down. You could see he was thinking. He was trying to come up with some kind of reasonable explanation as to how this physical evidence could be in the house. NARRATOR: Telese grasps at the only straw available to him-- an admission that, yes, he knew Susan Eigen, and that the two had a sexual relationship, which would explain away his DNA inside the house. While they don't buy his story, cold case detectives are concerned that a courts might. They do, however, have one last evidentiary card. If played correctly, it should leave Louis Telese with no wiggle room when he tries to make his case before a jury. [audio logo] On July 3, 2002, DNA analyst Terry Melton takes custody of two strands of hair collected from a bandanna used to strangle Susan Eigen 18 years earlier. Melton is able to extract a profile from the samples provided and compares it to Louis Telese's genetic signature. We had hairs from several known individuals, including Louis Telese, who was the suspect in the case. And what we found was that one of the hairs matched the type of Louis Telese. NARRATOR: For cold case detectives, it is the final piece they have been looking for. The case against Telese is handed over to the Nassau County DA and put on the docket for trial. [audio logo] On February 23rd of 2004, 20 years after the murder of Susan Eigen and her son Richard, Louis Telese's trial begins. Prosecutor Robert Biancavilla presents fingerprint and DNA evidence, tying Louis Telese to the double homicide. Just as important, Biancavilla paints a picture of Telese and the death he fashioned for Susan and Richard Eigen. He thought nothing about the manner in which he strangled and killed Susan. He thought nothing about taking a plastic bag and tying it in a knot over the head of a 17-year-old boy and then strapping him to a banister and essentially watching him suffocate to death. All right, this is a person that is never going to accept responsibility for what he did and deserves, as far as I'm concerned, absolutely no mercy. NARRATOR: A jury agrees, finding Louis Telese guilty of both murders and sentencing him to two consecutive terms of 25 to life. From the fingerprint examiner who spent years searching for the right set of prints to the homicide detectives who assembled the forensic case piece by painstaking piece, Louis Telese's conviction helps with the memories of a mother and son who died in their own home within a few feet of each other and without being shown a shred of mercy by their killer. Everybody involved, every detective involved with this case remembered details that you just don't remember on most cases. And it was the severity of this crime that really had a very deep impact on everyone that knew about it. I don't think there's any better satisfaction than solving a case that's been open for 18 years. You know, it's a fantastic feeling. [audio logo]
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Channel: A&E
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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, attorneys, police procedure, cold case files, cold case, murder investigation, true crime show, cold case files new episodes, watch cold case files, a&e full episodes, cold case files episodes, murder, homicide, unsolved murders, cold cases, unsolved homicides, unsolved crimes, dna, murderers, serial killers, death, unsolved death
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Length: 44min 20sec (2660 seconds)
Published: Sun Dec 24 2023
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