Terror Arizona State University: The Tragic Murder Of Fiona Yu | Murder Reopened | Real Crime

paper was light gold in medieval times [Music] i want tobacco sugar [Music] that everything we thought we knew about the world might turn out to be completely wrong a 21 year old arizona college student is sexually assaulted and strangled she was such a tiny little thing terror seizes the campus if it can happen to fiona it can happen to any one of us while a family copes with its devastation i remember asking god and i said how could you take her away from us of all people one by one investigators leads come up empty i brought out the picture i said what about her four years later a determined criminal profiler joins the search for truth sometimes it takes an outsider to say hey how about this in a case of murder reopened [Music] they said my head was a perfect fit for this hat i've always wanted to take care of my parents make sure they're okay right after i got out of school i promised my parents that whatever they needed i'd help them with i think i am basically the only kid right now that can take care of my parents i feel old she isn't old not by a long shot she has her whole life ahead of her but today the day of her graduation from the university of california in san diego the responsibility on samantha yu's shoulders is heavier than it was supposed to be every time i talk to my parents it's always a reflection of like just thinking about how painful was for them as it was for our entire family she's the first child in her family to graduate from college in the united states but she was supposed to be second seven years earlier it was fiona you wearing the cap and gown fiona the eldest charting the path as she graduated from arcadia high school in los angeles to the vast enjoyment of her proud family this is fiona's family over here okay you can say goodbye on film it was fiona saying goodbye because her future was waiting across the border at arizona state university in tempe arizona little did she know that that future would end abruptly in the summer of 1997. fiona you would die in her own apartment sexually assaulted and strangled the first victim in a summer of terror on a once peaceful campus in a once quiet town four years later criminal profiler john yarbrough will tackle the case criminal profiling deals mainly with sexual assault murder cases where there's a lot of human behavior demonstrated during the crime working hand in hand with tempe police he'll examine the behavior of a killer who struck like lightning and disappeared just as quickly how do we explain that all of that took place in relatively less than 10 minutes 15 max before he's finished he'll suggest a stunning possibility that fiona u's killer may have been closer than anyone imagined they're gonna have to work pretty quickly to eliminate them i think i think they're better clue by clue he will try to fill in the tragic last chapter of fiona u's life located in tempe arizona on the outskirts of phoenix arizona state university is home to nearly 50 000 students along with year-round sun the university boasts solid academics its business program is especially strong and that's what brought fiona you to asu she enjoyed the student life at asu tremendously as a matter of fact she mentioned to me on several occasions that she considered asu being her home and also she considered the arizona being homestead this picture was taken in early july 97. philip and cecilia you are chinese americans who met in canada and settled in california in 1986. fiona was their firstborn child four years later came twins samantha and kevin and some years after that a little brother named walter fiona and samantha were best friends i think a lot about just how we grew up together and how we'd share room together and we'd have so many nights where we just talk about guys or just different things that we could relate to at arizona state fiona found a second family but she got a part-time job at the asu alumni association fiona was not an outgoing young lady at that time but she fit right in she was such a kind kind person one of the gifts i think that she gives to the people that she befriends is simply that friendship very innocently unconditional friendship do you guys remember when she went home for a holiday and she came back and she had presents for people do you remember that then you still have the little it was the egg is that she kept giving little gifts right to us once she felt close to us right and that was her token that was her gesture august 4th 1997 was a monday the high temperature that day in tempe arizona was 106 degrees she left work at about five o'clock we spoke with co-workers with her that actually said goodbye to her talked to her talked about what her plans were larry baggs graduated from asu and joined the tempe police department 17 years ago he's been working the fiona u case since day one her apartment is approximately a half mile away from her work she rides a bike exactly what fiona's plans were that night no one knows but clearly fiona's years at asu had changed her once known for her shyness fiona was becoming more confident more vibrant she was really quiet around people she didn't know but once she would get to know a person she'd start going off there's a lot of attributes to her but playful comes to mind when you're just playing around with her running around she's always just sort of like a kid she just likes to have fun i just don't understand why anyone would want to harm a person like her to really look forward to is a case like fiona's while it's extremely tragic from the victim's perspective and the victim's family's perspective it is one hell of a challenge to the homicide investigator john yarbrough was a member of the los angeles county sheriff's department for 30 years 16 of them as a homicide investigator started when i was a kid i think i always knew i wanted to be a cop i'm the only one in my old family that was ever a cop in his final eight years with la sheriffs yarbrough underwent training in criminal profiling and crime scene analysis with the fbi and served as his department's sole criminal profiler and that's somewhat common to males if they're going to manipulate you often times they'll attack the credibility of your case today yarbrough teaches criminal profiling to agencies across the u.s and in europe he constantly stresses the non-random nature of most sexual homicides it's far from the truth that most sexual murders are done by jack the ripper or somebody like that or ted bundy passing through town stopping to commit some sort of horrendous act and then moving on in fact most of these crimes are committed by people who live work or visit in the environment of the victim fiona u's environment was the neighborhood just east of the asu campus there's very few variations she can take on the trip home she may catch a light and be delayed short time but i think that given the right circumstances she could have been home within five minutes fiona entered her apartment and dropped off her bike and backpack [Music] she then took her keys and exited the apartment via the sliding glass door the community mailboxes were a two-minute walk away person who lives in the complex with her sees her returning from the community mailbox towards her apartment he sees her go back to the rear door of carrying mail and he estimated that about five ten minutes after five o'clock one of the challenges always is for a profiler is establishing a positive rapport with the police agency i was a homicide investigator for a long time 16 years and i know that it is natural for those of us who do this job to be very possessive about our case the good news in this situation is that this case is four years old and not solved and therefore the investigators had a really serious interest in solving this case john hurry hi how you doing welcome it would be frustrating to have an unsolved case period had this been a drug dealer that got killed in a in a drug battle i would still be frustrated because it's an unsolved murder i think where there's a difference in this one is in this particular case she's a true victim they had a truly innocent kind of victim who was in no way the cause of her own demise and a nice person from all accounts that was somebody's daughter that was somebody's future wife or somebody's best friend somebody's roommate and she's not there anymore that's a motivation to want to solve the case and the other motivation is it was done in a particularly horrendous way the murder itself [Music] at approximately 5 10 p.m that same afternoon fiona's roommate kazuito left her on campus job at the asu library and headed for home on her bike at approximately 5 20 she arrived home she recalled seeing her victim's bicycle inside the apartment and also seeing her fiona's backpack from school so she knew that fiona had at least come home from work she felt that our victim was either upstairs or outside getting the mail or something along those lines kazu began preparing dinner it was close to six o'clock when the phone rang it was kazu's boyfriend when she returned to the kitchen after a few moments she had this uneasy feeling that something wasn't right and that's when she went upstairs [Music] arriving at the sea paramedics found fiona on the upstairs landing they made frantic attempts to revive her then transported her to tempe st luke's hospital a four minute drive away tempe police detective larry baggs received a call at home he departed immediately for fiona u's apartment investigators immediately tried to determine if fiona might have surprised a burglar there was no sign of forced entry but the lock on the sliding glass door was not functioning properly my first thoughts were this is somebody that knows her i think um did she let him in or were they already inside that i didn't know detective bagg's next destination was tempe st luke's hospital at 6 40 that evening fiona you had been declared dead her body would now provide the first testament to the cause and manner of that death i did notice patterned injuries and they were in the area of her head her clothing was a big factor fiona you were sexually assaulted her clothing was was removed to some degree but still on the body so she was exposed in areas but the clothing that was still on her indicated there was a sexual assault as well the patterned injuries indicated that fiona you had died by strangulation determining the exact type of strangulation will help john yarbrough create his profile of the strangler i try to determine whether those injuries are consistent with simply overpowering containing and controlling and victimizing or whether those injuries are inflicted for sexual gratification but as detective bags continued his preliminary investigation he was already facing the single most troubling and baffling aspect of this case in seven years of work in homicide i've never had a case where the window of the actual crime is 15 20 minutes half hour max fiona doesn't get home until a few minutes after five o'clock at the earliest so if a roomy comes home 5 20 5 25 even 5 30 that's given us a 15 20 minute window that's almost unheard of without eyewitnesses that didn't turn around and call the police but there were no eyewitnesses and no incoming calls regarding the murder of fiona yu late that night tempe police finally reached an aunt of fiona's who lived in the area she in turn called california i think it was around two in the morning or so and my brother was on the phone and he kind of clicked onto the other line and there was my aunt she just said i need to talk to your father i couldn't even believe what i heard and i said it would be very difficult for me to relay the message to my wife so do me a favor you talk to her the first 30 seconds were like no way you know you've got to be kidding you have the wrong person my mom was saying you probably have the wrong person this is not the same person there's no way you know you can only read about that and see it on tv but there's no way it's going to be vienna there's no way but it was fiona and what they were hearing was true she was gone and no one knew how or why the victim's no longer alive she can't tell you what happened it's your skills and ability that dictate how well you're able to speak for her four years later john yarbrough will try to help the tempe police department piece together her sad story first step victimology everything i can find out about the victim good bad or indifferent with the understanding that the more we know about the victim better we'll understand the crime the second step really has to do with the sequence of events trying to find out how the offender first came in contact with the victim how the crime occurred in what sequence [Music] how did the offender escape what did other people do did fiona you simply cross paths with a sadistic killer or was her death the final result of an obsession that grew with time until it finally turned murderous [Music] on august 8 1997 a small chapel across the street from arizona state university echoed with the strains of amazing grace the congregation was in a state of profound grief four days earlier their daughter sister and friend twenty-one-year-old fiona yu possibly the kindest individual they had ever known had been sexually assaulted and left to die on the floor of her own apartment just one mile away fiona's family and friends struggled to come to terms with their tremendous loss my fiancee was almost like took out like a part of everything from me like my heart everything just vanished they struggled to grasp the terror of fiona's last moments alive it was very surreal that something so brutal could happen to someone so innocent seven-year-old walter yu fiona's brother struggled to sum up all their grief in the words of a child this story is written by walter yu to her his sister fiona in the year 1997 walter left his sister everybody else in his family walter's sister died because she got strangled and was murdered even the roommate kazu was very sad because she died so yucky so the u family went to arizona and attended a funeral for walter sister we invited lots of people so there were lots of people crying nobody expected that she would die at the young age of 21 years old in the immediate aftermath of fiona's murder tempe police began their homicide investigation as they always must you look at the people who were around your victim who was she dating did she have a boyfriend did she have more than one boyfriend the investigation led them to mark hoffman fiona's long-term boyfriend detective larry baggs learned that just weeks earlier fiona had ended the relationship as i recall the roommate thought that the boyfriend was in new york at the time so actually that night we immediately began making contact in new york to confirm his whereabouts it was about 12 o'clock new york time because of the time difference when the police contacted me i was just downstairs watching tv with my father when they called and so i'm like who is this and they just kept pushing it and said this is mark hoffman right and i said yeah like well fiona was killed even confirming hoffman's whereabouts at that moment tempe police could not eliminate him as a suspect under the strangest circumstances he could have taken a red eye and got back up there and tried to make an alibi that way accompanied by his mother hoffman immediately flew to arizona turned on the tv stations and of course her picture was on the news and that just destroyed me the police wanted me coming on the station right away they knew we had broken up and i was a suspect they almost made me late for the funeral which i was very upset with them about but i made it there and said goodbye what i mean there was i just don't understand why anyone would want to harm a person like her she's caring she's fun she's just a beautiful person and someone has to be just extremely evil to be able to commit what they did criminal profiler john yarbrough's job is to help tempe police understand that evil and how it may have found its way to fiona u his preliminary analysis indicates nothing that would put fiona at risk of becoming the victim of a violent sexual slain she was not a drug user she was not somebody who had been in jail she was not somebody who had multiple affairs with a variety of people what she was she was young she was in good physical condition she was a student in a very large university in a well-populated area hey john how are you good to see you come on in deepening his investigation yarbrough travels to los angeles to consult with dr chris mohandi mohandi is a forensic psychologist who specializes in the analysis of violent sexual crime there's nothing more challenging than being at the intersection of life and death and that's what these situations are because if you don't catch these people they're going to kill somebody else or they're going to rape somebody else and they're going to perpetrate again and to be at that intersection is the place that i believe i've always been destined to be let me diagram how this occurs because what is significant in this case i think is the timetable the amount of time that the offender really had in order to victimize her without being discovered what's the window of opportunity john 10 minutes 15 minutes 10 minutes 10 minutes are we a hundred percent sure that she didn't get off early yeah yarbrough and mohandi focus on the apartment itself exactly what happened and when they've already learned that at the time of the murder the lock on the sliding glass door was not functioning properly raising the distinct possibility that this was the killer's point of entry the key question is when did that entry occur i'm trying to figure out whether i think the offender was already in the apartment or whether he came to the apartment after she arrived any sign of berg that's difficult because of the malfunction on the slider right but in the bedrooms nothing about had yet been tampered with discovering when and why fiona's attacker entered her apartment will bring yarbro and mohandi closer to discovering who he was meanwhile tempe police already hold one piece of this puzzle in the fiona u autopsy they found abundant biological evidence left by her killer it was on this basis that fiona u's former boyfriend mark hoffman was completely eliminated but there were dozens of other potential suspects in the days after the initial investigation and we're doing the background check on the circle of friends around her we discovered that there was one particular person who was an acquaintance with her that had a crush on her to some degree we also had another individual who lived in the complex next door to fiona's complex that we found had prior contact at the apartment with the roommate's boyfriend and there was a verbal altercation between those two bagg sent investigators to question these individuals and collect dna samples from them meanwhile bags tried to track down any possible eyewitness to the events surrounding fiona's murder then he found one we did have one individual who thought they had seen someone at her door just before she got home that individual worked as a maintenance man in the neighborhood where fiona you lived he voluntarily gave a statement to police investigators and was not a suspect in her slaying for reasons of his own safety he asked that his identity be kept anonymous the witness says he didn't know fiona well i just know she just went to school came home did her studies and they mostly stayed in her apartment most of the time you know but on the day fiona was murdered he believes he may have seen the person who did it i was walking across the street to go to a friend's house when i noticed this gentleman coming out of her apartment and he looked around to see if anybody was seeing him they walked off at that time i really didn't think anything about it until her roommate came home and found her dead so i walked over and told the cops that i think i may have seen the guy unfortunately the witness's description was not highly detailed he was probably about six foot tall up to 30 black male it gave detective bags very little to work with at the same time dna tests of potential suspects started coming back one after another their dna didn't match the biological evidence from the fiona u crime scene almost everybody of significance that the investigators have encountered have been eliminated by dna detective bags felt the fiona u homicide investigation slipping away from him the first 72 hours are crucial in terms of identifying a suspect if it's not within the first three four five days if you don't have something pretty concrete it's going to be a long battle and this one has proved that out yarbrough gains permission to survey an apartment in fiona's complex identical to the one where her murder took place so he can envision the crime in the space where it actually happened later he reviews the videotaped document of his exploration with the physical evidence right there at the top of the landing is it possible that the offender was already inside this apartment and is the place where he attacked the most advantageous place for him from a tactical standpoint or is this a happenstance encounter and what i'm kind of looking at is whether i think it's more likely that the two of them met unexpectedly on the landing as opposed to he's laying in weight for her as opposed to he followed her up the stairs and attacked from the rear god i was lucky to find this milk crate gave me something to sit on i learned this from an old la county sheriff's homicide investigator and the more i thought about his technique the better i liked it and that is he just takes something out sits on it and looks at the entire scene without really trying to conceive a logical progression of the crime he spends more time just looking at what he's seeing ultimately yarbrough formulates three possible scenarios for how fiona used killer contacted her and why he killed her the first is that the killer saw fiona that very day for the first time in what amounts to a random encounter predator offenders will often go to target rich environments so where is this guy likely to have first observed this victim and well you could say anywhere on the asu campus that's certainly likely but as yarbrough noted the physical evidence mail keys and fiona's body indicate that she was blitz attacked at the top of the stairs meaning her killer almost certainly entered the apartment ahead of her this weakens the random killer hypothesis yarbrough moves on to scenarios two and three the second scenario is the polar opposite of the first it envisions a premeditated attack with fiona and no one else as its target the offender had identified his potential victim he had determined where he was going to attack the victim in what manner and he anticipated the time of day he did all of that well in advance he knows that he's got a limited period of time yarbrough's third scenario also involves some degree of premeditation in the choice of fiona as a target but the event itself occurs spontaneously some degree of surveillance some degree of target identification but the opportunity at that very moment seemed to be better than other times there were less people around nobody else was home he saw the victim come in by herself and he took advantage of that the way yarbrough sees it if this scenario is true then fiona's killer probably took advantage of her trip to the mailboxes to sneak in go upstairs and wait for her to return in the summer of 1997 tempe police were still grappling with fiona u's lightning swift brutal slaying when the asu community was struck by violence again six weeks after fiona's murder two more coeds were sexually assaulted in broad daylight the perpetrator described as a large african-american male closely matched tempe police's one eyewitness description of fiona's possible murderer asu it seemed was under attack and no one knew what would happen next the individual who murdered arizona state university student fiona yu in the summer of 1997 carried out his vicious assault in the virtual blink of an eye between the moment fiona arrived home and her roommate's arrival some 15 minutes later but for criminal profiler john yarbrough the speed of the attack is just one riddle to be solved another is the attack's timing coming in broad daylight on a hot still august afternoon what i'm trying to do is come to some understanding as to why at a very high risk time of day when this murder was committed somewhere around 5 5 30 in the afternoon and in this neighborhood of pedestrian and bicycle traffic why was he willing to run the risk of committing the crime at that very moment but six weeks after fiona's murder it suddenly began to seem that in tempe arizona assaulting women in broad daylight was not all that risky on two consecutive september days a rapist struck the asu community again in the middle of the afternoon the first victim she lived in an apartment complex that was rather large it housed over 500 residents and most of those were arizona state university students it was in the afternoon at that time she had just gotten done swimming in the pool went back up to her apartment which was on the second floor at one time during the assault the suspect started to thrash at her with scissors the apartment complex was no more than a half mile from fiona use complex one day later a second assault occurred this time in an on-campus dorm less than a mile from fiona u's apartment this location was also no more than a quarter mile from the asu alumni association where fiona left work just minutes before she was murdered the victim a 17 year old sophomore was studying in her room when she heard a knock on the door she looked through the peephole noticed two young males african-american she opened the door and immediately was blitzed attacked by the larger of the two suspects comparing the september assaults to the august murder of fiona u investigators saw the distinct possibility of a serial predator operating in the asu community the attacks were of a blitz style in which a sexual assault occurred at both and that strangulation was also used for control they were within a tight proximity of where fiona's attack occurred daylight hours very similar apartment complex dorm type buildings and asu students so we immediately thought that this could be our guide the problem was the suspect was still at large [Music] [Applause] arizona state university already on edge because of fiona u's murder went into shock andrew ortiz remembers it well he was student body president at the time it was an already tense situation with a murder happening on our campus but then with those two rapes happening almost at the same moment in time it was a powder keg these women on our campus were very very much afraid because they were afraid to go back to their dorms they were afraid to walk across campus they were afraid to go from class to class at night they felt that a place that they had actually wanted to be was a place that the quality of life was being taken away from them and their life could be taken away from them not just the quality of their life so far two asu students had survived their attacks but a third fiona you had died for criminal profiler john yarbrough the behavior displayed in a murder scene provides the most information about the motives of a particular offender so he convenes a roundtable of investigators from the fiona u case including detectives bags and magazini retired detective al reed and forensic pathologist dr ann bucholtz who performed fiona's autopsy analyzing the wounds that fiona sustained on route to her death the investigators find evidence of both fiona's personality and the personality of her attacker but i think she's got a couple of personality characteristics and traits that are important to what may have happened to her at the time of the attack she's easily intimidated according to her former boyfriend and somebody else described her as compliant right yeah and almost everybody we interviewed said that she's not assertive by no means and uh not one that that that would put up probably a struggle i would agree with that based on all the friends we talked to and it kind of explains some of the things we don't see because had she become more resistant then i would surely have expected to see more grip marks or holding indications of physically controlling her which for the most part are not here there's no marks there that it can conducive with the control he didn't have to because he didn't have to combine that with her personality and he's got her there's one other thing though to comment about apparently he didn't want to true he doesn't do any torture he doesn't do any excessive battering unnecessarily she doesn't have overkill type things and there's no defamation of the body which many times they also do after sexual oriented crimes the round table helps yarbrough clarify his interpretation of fiona u's autopsy report we're not looking for an offender in this case who achieved sexual gratification from watching the victim being in a lot of pain and agony because there didn't seem to be any of that application of torture to the victim so i think that tells us a lot about our offender and his motivation it also confirms a lot about what we heard about the victim but was this offender the same rogue stalker who six weeks later assaulted two more arizona state students tempe police would soon find out one week after the back-to-back campus attacks investigators had two men under arrest under interrogation they believed their suspects would soon confess to the brutal slaying of fiona yu as well [Music] with a new school year just beginning september 1997 should have been a time of high hopes and optimism at arizona state university instead it was a time of terror in the previous six weeks three female students had been sexually assaulted one of the victims 21 year old fiona you had died a sexual predator with homicidal tendencies appeared to be loose on campus you think about what is it that that you're up against are you going to be up against copycat type situation was it an isolated incident is that person still in the midst then just as suddenly as the attacks occurred there was a breakthrough acting on a tip police went to tempe high school and arrested 17-year-old lee comier police say both comier and 16-year-old classmate derrick wood have admitted involvement in two rapes on the asu campus last week tempe homicide detective larry baggs took comey and woods rape confessions nothing had yet been said about the murder of fiona you i had had fiona's picture with me the entire time and towards the end totally unprepared they didn't know it was coming and i brought out the picture and i handed it to him i said what about her they looked at it and there was just nothing there it didn't click with them and the body language was there was no response emotionally physically there was nothing still optimistic county prosecutors ordered dna testing of comey and wood to compare to the fiona u crime scene evidence but to detective bags it looked like his most promising lead yet had just fallen through you're doing everything you can and the leads aren't coming in or every time you check one out it turns out that that's not the guy you're looking for well it doesn't make logical sense that the suspect would follow the victim in through the slider attack her as she's upstairs and then escape from the scene by going out through the front door but four years later a stunning insight from criminal profiler john yarbrough suddenly injects new life into the investigation when i arrived at tempe td and was given all the reports and i sat there with larry baggs and i spent a great deal of time reading all of these different reports and i began to formulate my early stage opinion that the offender came from within the environment and that he would be somebody that would not stand out like the hunchback of notre dame this opinion alone helps yarbrough answer one of his own fundamental questions why was fiona used murderer willing to commit such a heinous and high-profile crime on a sunny afternoon in a well-populated neighborhood the answer yarbrough believes is the offender knew his mere presence would not arouse suspicion who is it that best fits that kind of description it could be anybody who lives in the apartments in and around the victim it could also be anybody who works in the apartment in and around the victims and i said that to larry as he's sitting there and we were discussing what my preliminary thinking was and detective bag says you mean like the maintenance man and i said that's exactly who i was thinking of somebody like that the maintenance man is the individual who worked in fiona u's neighborhood in 1997 and provided police with a description of her possible killer police did not consider him a suspect and four years later he volunteered to be interviewed about what he saw that day for his own safety he requested that his identity be kept anonymous so i walked over and told the cops that i think i may have seen the guy in 1997 tempe police considered the handyman credible yarbrough suggests a closer look in his opinion the handyman is an example of a type of possible offender who was sometimes overlooked during criminal investigations the offender oftentimes is in the place to view the victim from a legitimate standpoint i mean he's there for legitimate reasons he lives there works there visiting there overall yarbrough finds the individual's interview unhelpful an example is the description of the african-american male whom the witness allegedly saw outside fiona yu's apartment he was probably about six foot tall a 2 30 40 maybe black male basically a pretty vague description he never gave an age no clothing description to me you only have two choices he's either telling the truth and there was a guy standing there at the door or he's creating a diversion by telling you that there was a guy at the door when in fact he never saw any guy at the door fabricating such a story could reflect something sinister or it could simply be the act of an individual who craves the spotlight at a different point yarbrough finds the handyman's interview confusing i came across the street and i noticed this gentleman coming out of her apartment which didn't look right you know so i walked around the corner and i stood there for a little bit you know peeking around the corner i stopped there for a second i don't know what to make of the very first thing out of his mouth the question confuses yarbrough for a simple reason in his original statement to police the maintenance man said he was already across the street from fiona u's apartment when he made his observation of the possible suspect the original statement is he was working at the apartment across the street number 133 and just happened to glance across the street and see this subject okay and so that's where he should have said i looked across the street and saw this gentleman but when he starts off his story i came across the street i don't know what he's talking about i came across the street and i noticed this gentleman coming out of her apartment which didn't look right you know so i walked around the corner and i stood there for a little bit you know peeking around the corner it's not even suspicious because he doesn't know that there's any activity going on in the victim's apartment he doesn't know that she's dead right but for some reason this is a scary enough situation where he has to hide around the corner all in all yarbrough finds the maintenance man statements not believable although the apparent discrepancies could reflect the simple inability of an attention seeker to keep his stories straight but there's one point in the interview on which the maintenance man is unequivocal clearly he found fiona you attractive she was a kid she thought she was attractive what's tomorrow damn i want one no the interview leads yarbrough to conclude the maintenance man merits closer attention and it must happen quickly it's been four years since fiona you was murdered to investigators the time to bring closure is now [Music] it's been four years since samantha yu's only sister fiona was brutally slain one year shy of her college graduation today with fiona's murderer still at large samantha bravely completes a dream that was stolen from her sister there's so many uncertainties but i guess it's helpful just to know that my sister is definitely looking down and seeing what i'm doing and like seeing what my parents are doing and she'll definitely be there when i graduate she'll be there for everything samantha you [Music] unfortunately the celebration also serves to highlight everything that fiona used killer destroyed when he took her life we were getting to the age where you know the older you get the closer you get we would have grown up and talked about marriage and her kids and everything and probably retire together and live in a house together and we miss her you know we'll never know now what she's gone on to become most of our students keep in touch with us and they let us know what they're doing and where they're working and where they've moved and their families they have i'm feeling i just it stopped at age 21. unlike fiona u the victims of lee comia and derrick wood survived their assaults and even managed to piece their lives together again both of the victims did very well at arizona state university i know one of them has just recently graduated for spearheading the assaults lee comier was sentenced to 107 years in prison derrick wood comier's partner in the second attack received an 18-year sentence but in december 1997 dna tests proved conclusively that neither man was guilty of the death of fiona you ultimately however john yarbrough's criminal profile of the man who killed fiona you points towards a different type of offender than comey and wood i think this is a much more long term observing of this particular victim i don't think he saw her for the first time that day and then victimized her that day i think for days and days if not longer he has been cognizant of her presence monitoring the activity in the apartment and then either impulsively doing something or taking advantage of what he perceived to be a golden opportunity to access her yarbrough suggests that tempe police deal quickly with the case of the handyman that's what profiling really tries to do is help conserve the resources and dedicate them in the right direction rather than expending a lot of wasted energy in this particular case they have a potential suspect in mind in order to be as efficient as possible with the limited resources that they have they have to pursue the elimination quickly elimination will involve a straightforward scientific task tempe police will seek to obtain a dna sample from the maintenance man but yarbrough has done more than suggest one new investigative lead he has given the fiona u investigation a new direction by turning the focus back on her immediate surroundings and suggesting the predatory path that may have led her killer to her door i think the profilers are a very valuable asset to investigation especially of this nature their abilities are uncanny if you get somebody who's well trained and knows what they're doing they can literally solve a case for you in profiling this case is something we've considered all along they're an incredible asset to investigators of this nature really truly sexual murders are not unsolved they just don't have a solution for a period of time so maybe one day somebody's going to walk in and say something they'll be able to piece it all together very quickly but it'll be because nobody forgot because the evidence is strong and because there was a continuing interest in the investigation yarbrough has helped detective larry baggs get closer to the one phone call he so desperately wants to make what i think back to is prior cases that went extended period of times i've had cases go up to two and a half years before i made an arrest the biggest thing that i enjoyed about that case was calling the family and telling them we have a suspect in custody personally i would like to hurt this person i would like them to feel the pain the anguish the humiliation that fiona had gone through that day but i guess the moral side of me would just like to see this person put behind bars so that he can't do this anymore all i want is just some truth you know truth about like what happened because we don't have a story we don't know the facts of everything and just to know the facts and to know there's some sort of justice that can be done in some way that cry for justice will keep john yarbrough searching until fiona yu's killer is behind bars he does it for her family but mainly he says it's for fiona herself you become part of the victim's family absolutely i've got people that still send cards and letters from families and that's gratifying that you were able to do something to put a solution to this situation it's more gratifying from my perspective to do it in behalf of the victim and that's my motivation i'll miss you guys and thanks for everything if you have any information about the murder of fiona you please contact the tempe police department at area code 480-350-8311 all calls are confidential and you may remain anonymous thank you

Channel: Real Crime

Views: 94,162

Keywords: real crime, crime documentary, true crime, full documentary, full episode, full tv series, tv, latest, id, documentary, series, watch, free, full crime episode, season, episodes, snapped, 72 hours, women, full, online, documentaries, justice by any means, candice delong, minds, discovery, murder reopened, murder investigation, murder investigation documentary, unsolved crimes, unsolved mysteries

Id: ruftQoRzFXk

Length: 48min 6sec (2886 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 07 2021