The Mom Who Caught Her Killer Son | Dark Waters Of Crime | Real Crime

paper was light gold in medieval times i want tobacco sugar [Music] that everything we thought we knew about the world might turn out to be completely wrong source of life and cause of death water can wash away clues dilute evidence and conceal corpses for investigators water can be a cunning opponent for criminals a most accommodating ally for the perfect crime just add water on the morning of saturday october 14 1995 70 kilometers east of vancouver british columbia the peaceful town of abbotsford is plunged into a nightmare when a fisherman discovers a young woman's mutilated naked body in the veda river the long hunt begins for the murderer a man who will terrorize the community for months he will profoundly affect the people of this town and will capture the attention of the national press we'll dub him the abbotsford killer [Music] it's friday the 13th of october misty cockrell and her friend tanya smith are on their way home from a party but instead the two 16 year olds decide to continue their evening and go to another party nearby on the way their lives will be changed [Music] forever [Music] when misty regains consciousness a few hours later the attacker has disappeared so is her friend tanya with great difficulty she drags herself to the hospital a few blocks away [Music] rod gale is the lead investigator for the abbotsford police the duty sergeant gave me a call and told me that there had been a young girl coming to the msa hospital and she was badly beaten and she was telling the nurses there that her friend was still missing at that point we called out a couple of teams of detectives and our investigation began misty's skull is fractured and she needs immediate surgery she struggles to talk to the detectives as she drifts in and out of consciousness [Music] tanya was out by the school is what she was telling us so we had a group of officers over searching in the area of the school to see if we could find tanya there is no trace of tanya did she manage to escape or did the assailant take her with him police fear the worst at 8 00 am a man is salmon fishing in the veda river about 15 kilometers outside of abbotsford suddenly something floating nearby in the shallow waters attracts his attention as he gets closer he discovers the naked lifeless body of a young woman [Music] i was at the hockey rink with my son and i received a page from my office and i subsequently called back to my office got some details and then i spoke to the abbotsford police about an incident they had as well the abbotsford police send a picture of tanya smith to inspector mccloud who is the lead investigator for the rcmp he arrives at the vetter river with detective kevin hackett when i arrived there the police had cordoned off the area where the body had been recovered brought ashore and was covered inspector mcleod confirms that the victim is indeed tanya smith the 16 year old reported missing by her friend misty mccloud and hackett examined the victim we were concerned about the damage that water could do to forensic evidence dna evidence saliva washing away some fabric or fiber evidence that could be crucial so an important process is to ensure that the hands are bagged with paper bags because in a struggle they may defend themselves and strike back at an attacker and if they scratch the attacker they'll get dna under the fingernails the body is placed in a body bag that protects it from the outside environment in an effort to stop any contamination from outside sources and then it's transported to the the morgue where it's locked in a crypt detective mcleod searches the area for evidence and makes an interesting discovery [Music] there was another scene located just to the south of where the body was recovered and that it was a pathway that went down to the water and at the entrance to that path what turned out to be tanya's clothes had been thrown up in the bushes and there were some indications on the ground that that's where her body had been placed in the water the investigators are intrigued by the fact that the murder has chosen to display the victim's clothing [Music] i think it was clear that he wanted her body to be discovered so that may be part of that his criminal mindset was to deposit the body when he knew that he would not be detected with it but it would be found the following day when the river be filled with fishermen there were some tire impressions found and there were some drag marks what appeared to be drag marks on the ground still in hospital misty is fighting for her life but the police are anxious for her recollection of the attack she's seen her assailant and she knows where the attack took place we sent a detective there with a tape recorder and the instruction was tape recorded everything she said she had been coherent enough to share information she deteriorated later on to the point where she was giving information that was incoherent she had what the doctors described to us as at least three home run type swings to the head [Music] her hand was broken her arm was injured badly her skull was badly enough indented into her brain that she had bleeding to her brain with such severe injuries the detectives realize that misty's memory may be vague and unreliable but she is their only lead in medical terms misty has received a blunt head trauma montreal forensic pathologist dr annie sovijo explains donald trump says trauma to the head will often erode the scalp but also cause cuts because the weapon hits the scalp and the bone is underneath the scalp is caught between two hard objects the weapon and the skull so the scalp will open it will tear that's what we call laceration if the weapon strikes hard enough the skull will also break and you'll have a skull fracture whether the skull breaks or not the brain may be damaged and blood may pool around the brain [Music] this blood will cover the brain and it may cause a chemical irritation making the brain swell [Music] so if we have a brain that is swelling but no holes in the skull the brain will try to find a way to eliminate the excess pressure that excess will come out through holes in the base called the foramen magnum where the marrow is generally located so bits of brain go there but there is still not enough room for the swelling brain and it compresses important centers that control the respiration the pulse and the blood vessels and this can lead to death the doctors and police are amazed that misty managed to get to the hospital with such severe injuries the remarkable thing about it was that the attack happened at about midnight 12 30 and she never came into the hospital until about 4 30 in the morning she'd been lying outside on the ground and she managed to find her way around to the front to the emergency ward and stumbled through the doors and that was of course a question that we had we thought perhaps somebody even had helped her to get there she was beaten so badly [Music] in an effort to find witnesses or information relating to the crime the police issue a press release and set up a tip-line call center [Music] in the meantime investigators try to piece together statements made by misty to help them locate the crime scene what we had for misty was she was over by the school in the bushes so that's a fairly large area which included behind the hospital and we had detective teams going through the bushes area behind the hospital behind the school and all down that particular street after three days there's still no trace of the attack site given her critical condition could misty have inadvertently misled them the town of abbotsford british columbia is in mourning two young girls have been violently attacked on their way to a party misty cockroach barely escaped the attacker and is in critical condition in the hospital under police protection sixteen-year-old tanya smith has been found dead in a river her body beaten and mutilated the police are still looking for the scene where the attack took place it wasn't in fact until the morning of the 18th four days later that we were able to establish the actual attack site by finding a who bearing that had been knocked off of misty the attack site is finally confirmed in spite of the fact that the rain has washed away the girl's blood [Music] it was late at night but there are residents in that area there were people that heard screams and at least two witnesses that heard a female voice saying no no no nobody from the police however but that's not unusual either so it's a high risk attack and high risk area sometimes that's part of the thrill of it for these guys that same day police receive a report of an object that may be of interest located not far from the vetta river a local farmer that knew we were looking for evidence out in that area phoned in and said i've i can see a baseball bat floating in the ditch don't think it was there yesterday misty had told the police that her assailant beat her with a baseball bat could this be the weapon used during the attack on misty and tanya the police have the bat examined by rcmp forensics that same day inspector mcleod answers a call on the tip line the first time he called i was in the in the command room and picked up the tip line at the other end of the line a man claims to be the person who found misty and helped her get to the hospital [Music] inspector mcleod tries to obtain more information but the man hangs up without identifying himself the stranger was using a public pay phone and the police were unable to trace the call [Music] later in the afternoon another call astounds the police the same man who spoke earlier with inspector mccloud now gives details regarding the body of the victim found in the river he claims to be tanya smith's killer and proves it by mentioning details that were not released to the public [Music] it's not likely that it could have been done by anyone else other than the perpetrator the information the main piece of holdback information that we had was the location of the bite on on tania's body and the caller when he called us always referred to that area the bite as his calling card so to speak this time the call is traced back to a pay phone at the abbotsford arena police and the forensic identification unit are immediately dispatched we were getting the information within uh minutes for the timing of the phone call being made from the time it took to drive to the exit we feel that the first police responders must have met him as he was driving out the response was that quick unfortunately it didn't identify him telephone receivers generally are quite greasy and dirty and and you may get uh prints on top of prints hard to determine if it's one individual or not um it's a public area and you're not going to get good results but to actually find something that's usable is pretty slim early that evening the tips line receives another call from the killer this time he mocks the police and laughs at their inability to catch him one of his phone calls to us he said do you think i'd be stupid enough to leave fingerprints behind when i made a phone call and that led us to believe that he was watching us dust the pay phone uh where the 911 call was made the same evening the killer calls a fourth time he continues to taunt the investigators and admits he's looking for new victims he wants to kill again to help apprehend the killer a telecommunications company develops a new technology to assist the investigation they were able to put in a remote answering system that would show us uh when a 911 call was coming into our dispatch center from a pay phone and before the dispatcher answered that call she'd be able he or she would be able to tell where that phone call was coming from which payphone it was coming from and dispatch a car to be attending there and then answer the p answer the 911 call and talk to the person and during the time that they were talking to the person there would be a police car on route to this 9-1-1 call we saturated the streets of oxford with as many investigative teams as we possibly could in anticipation he was going to call in those areas that he had called in the past so that if there was a call we could respond quickly and we did patrol cars arrive on the site shortly after the call but the killer escapes once again the police make another statement to the media warning the city of abbotsford that this violent predator is on the loose they request that women in particular be very careful the community is gripped by fear the tip line receives thousands of calls from people wanting to help catch the murderer the investigators received the results from the analysis of the baseball bat no dna evidence was found the bat cannot be linked to the crime [Music] misty is still in critical condition but she is the only one who has seen the murderer the police send a forensic artist to visit her to create a composite drawing in her brief moments of consciousness she describes her assailant on october 20th six days after the attack the face of the abbotsford killer appears in all the newspapers we had of course released a composite that misty had assisted in preparing we had debated about the value of that given her injuries but we decided to release that that generated a lot of tips from the public the police follow up on all the tips they receive from the public it's a long laborious process the cause of tanya's death can only be confirmed with an autopsy will the evidence found on her body offer the investigators a solid lead detective kevin hackett is present at the autopsy she had very significant skull fracture she had trauma to her face it looked like she'd been beaten around the face and in her abdomen area an almost visible footprint with some of the soil that was left and there was the significant injury the bite mark to her breast tanya's body was in the river for many hours it's quite possible that the water has washed away precious evidence could the analysis of the bite mark help identify the murderer will it give police the evidence they need to arrest the abbotsford killer the town of abbotsford british columbia is in shock two teenage girls have been violently attacked one is dead and the other is struggling to stay alive a man who identifies himself as the murderer has been calling and taunting the police he has threatened to kill again spreading terror through the city investigators work around the clock searching for leads the results of tanya smith's autopsy may give them the evidence they need to stop the murderer before he claims another victim [Music] although dr carlile believed that the head injuries brain injuries were so significant she likely would have died from them but the official cause was drowning because she was submerged in the water and still inhaling water into her lungs the pathologist also finds that the victim has been raped samples are set for dna profiling to examine the bite mark on the victim's breast the police call on dr sweet a forensic odontologist with an international reputation when we collect bite mark evidence there's a specific protocol that we follow and it included swabbing the skin as an initial examination and then looking at the physical evidence that result from the teeth interacting with the skin we had to photograph the bite mark extensively in order to record those patterns and shapes in reference to a scale or a ruler that's placed near the bite mark and in addition to that we take a cast or we make a mold of the skin so that we can record any undulations or differences in the surface from normal [Music] dr sweet uses a new technique to collect dna from the bite mark the saliva that is deposited during biting i thought would be a very good source of dna evidence and so i had developed a method of collecting that saliva using two swabs one wet and one dry because the victim had been in the water for several hours there was really no way of knowing what we were going to be able to achieve it was assumed that the water would have washed away all of the evidence the swabbing method involves using two swabs the first one is dipped in sterile distilled water to wet it so that the dried stain that's on the surface of the skin can be hydrated and loosened the discovery that we made when we were developing this method was that there are still cells from the saliva left in contact with the skin after the first swab leaves the surface so if we could come back with a dry swab a second separate swab to act as a sponge we can collect the water and the remaining cells that are now loose from the skin surface [Music] we were very surprised when we got a dna result and we started to look at why the saliva was acting like this why after several hours in the water we were still able to obtain a result saliva contains a viscous substance called mucin that's what held the suspect's dna on tanya's skin part of the saliva was lost in the river but there was enough left to produce a partial dna result for the investigators this is an important discovery a full dna profile was produced from the siemens sample that was found in the post-coatal swab but a partial dna profile was produced from the bite mark but enough of the dna profile was obtained in order to compare that not only with the semen to show that the same person that had sex with the victim also bit her police hold back this information from the public to ensure that the murderer is not aware of the evidence found [Music] after 12 days of silence the abbotsford killer calls the police again this time the call comes from a phone booth outside the recreation center patrol cars race to the scene but once again the killer escapes the investigation is stalling the police are aware of the stress on the city and they have to stop the terror they turn to forensic psychology [Music] when the police call on forensic psychologists it's usually because there's something strange in the behavior of the individual that they can't understand it's something out of the ordinary in these cases they'll ask a psychologist to do a uh psychological profile of that individual there's a danger though that you have to be mindful of as an investigator or as uh as a team commander and the danger is tunnel vision and focusing uh too much on that profile and ignoring other avenues of investigation or other people of interest or other evidence that doesn't fit with a profile but it can be a valuable tool but you have to be very careful in how you use that tool dr mike webster is brought in to prepare a psychological profile of the murderer this was a spontaneous act this was a retaliatory type of crime that he committed here any sexual overtones were secondary they were simply another way to brutalize and dehumanize these girls this was an act of of savage retaliation tanya and misty presented an opportunity for him he physically intimidated them and he psychologically intimidated them part of his motive was to blow off some of this anger this steam that he had against women and and this is unusual because um i mean usually when someone commits a crime post-crime behavior is they want to distance themselves from their crime so that they won't be discovered in this case he had a desire to demonstrate to the police that he was smarter than they were that he could outwit them and what he had done here by going to the river was in effect create two crime scenes attempting to complicate matters for the police the telephone calls that came afterwards this was his way of involving him and himself in the investigation this was his way of maintaining the excitement of the crime by continuing to interact with the police and demonstrate to them that he could outwit them that he was smarter than they were 24 days after the attack the police set up a call in line where people can listen to samples of the killer's phone calls they hope that someone will recognize his voice i think what really started to scare the community is when he started making phone calls and taunting us and then we started to play those on the air i think it really scared people and it was quiet around town you could drive downtown at night and there wasn't a lot of traffic you didn't see people out walking people were scared finally on december 1st there is a new development in the investigation and we had a suspect that had been arrested on this particular as being identified as a person responsible for the attacks and he was a lookalike a dead ringer for the composite drawing the suspect gives a dna sample and his dental imprint have the police arrested the abbotsford killer a violent murder is hiding in the small british columbian city of abbotsford he terrorizes the community taunts the police and promises to kill again [Music] misty cockrell one of his young victims clings to life in hospital a composite drawing is published in all the newspapers a recording of the killer's voice is broadcast on radio and television on december 1st investigators arrest a man who bears a striking resemblance to the composite drawing he is well known to police and agrees to give a dna sample and his dental imprint he was really really quick to give all the dna and bite mark we didn't have a fingerprint at that time but he gave dna in a bite mark to get himself cleared the suspect is held in custody while the dna samples are examined in the meantime the police continue their investigation i was asked to record dental impressions on five different suspects over a period of about six months i had seen traits in the teeth that were quite characteristic and unique so i was able to take impressions of those suspects teeth and when within a very short period of time exclude them as being the cause of the bite mark over the course of the investigation there was 9 500 tips came in and most of those were people being identified as possible suspects so we're getting local likes to the composite drawings and sound of likes to the voice and people were very very anxious to to help and we were getting lots of calls so thousands thousands of suspects were eliminated the dna results are negative and the suspect is released he is not the abbotsford killer the killer has not contacted the police for weeks his silence weighs heavily and his threat to kill again echoes through the streets of the city on february 17th the host of a radio show receives an anonymous call [Music] the man tells him to go and look in the parking lot quickly realized that it said tanya smith on the gravestone and there was embossed picture and so he called the police right away our officers attended and took the headstone as evidence and found that it had been defaced there's threats scribbled on it to misty there was a reference uh on it to the bite mark and quite amazing when nobody saw him lift this big 180-pound headstone out of there and put it on the hood of the car so it was uh it was like we were chasing a a ghost day this guy is invisible the kind of person who proceeds like that who deliberately puts out clues make sure the victim will be recovered quickly and identified their main purpose is really to get some attention improve their self-image which may be very ordinary in fact two days later the killer calls the police and asks them if they liked his gift the provoking call is made from a payphone booth only two streets from the police station [Music] he disappears yet again without leaving a trace witnesses give police descriptions of a man they had seen but the leads do not produce a suspect on february 21st four months after the attack the killer makes contact for the eighth time he just picked a residential street he had walked up to the front of this house and right through the front living room window we heave this ranch corporal mike colson he is a forensic identification technician uh for the abbotsford police and he spent a long time very very carefully taking this package apart and of course when you get a letter the temptation is to rip into the letter and find out what's inside never forget the night we've read that note for the first time and uh just chills going up my spine it was absolutely terrifying horrific the wrench was taped to an envelope with a letter inside it was typewritten with no punctuation in it the killer brags of having committed three other attacks he included newspaper clippings and details that allow the police to confirm his claims there is no doubt that tanya and misty are not his first victims he talked about other conquests uh and in the end he said you won't catch me uh i'm not gonna move out of town and i will strike again and goodbye for now guys and it was written sort of almost in a friendly format so it was really a strange letter the forensic expert examines every square millimeter of this package handling it with extreme care [Music] he finds no prints on the clippings no prints on the letter no prints on the envelope however on closer examination the piece of tape holds an obscured clue and if you think about tearing a piece of tape off a roll you're using your thumb and your index finger and again looking at the process normally you would tear a piece of tape with your index finger on the sticky side and that's what we keyed in on they use a new technique designed for difficult media like adhesive tape he used a powder called sticky side powder which is basically a powder that you mix with a solution that suspends the powder and then you wash it over the the tape and it'll stick to the to the glued side of the other tape where the finger had touched will the police find the fingerprint of the abbotsford killer has he finally made the fatal mistake that everyone has been waiting for abbotsford british columbia is on high alert for the last five months a murderer has been terrorizing the city and provoking the police he has desecrated the grave of his victim tanya smith who is found beaten raped and drowned kenya's friend misty has survived the attack but is under police protection because the murderer has threatened to kill her the police examine a letter that the killer had thrown randomly through a house window the forensic expert applies a special solution designed to detect fingerprints on tape but he sees nothing he puts the sample under a microscope looking for hair or fibers that's when he found the fingerprint it was so faint so then he photographed it and went in the dark room and just kept on darkening and darkening darkening until it until it came up the police now have an extremely valuable piece of evidence an index fingerprint of the abbotsford killer the discovery is held back from the media so as to not alert the murderer we had dna and we knew there was a bite mark but again we had nothing to compare it to and not until we found the print did we have something that we could actually start comparing it to suspects the print is sent to the canadian fingerprint database for comparison the result is negative the print is also sent to the fbi and other american agencies but again there are no matches [Music] our whole perception of who we were after changed we were thinking before it would be somebody that had a record for sexual assault or assault or some something like that a known criminal or some kind of criminal record and in fact he did not have a criminal record at all seven months after the attack the police digitally enhanced the recorded phone calls from the killer and make them public we'd set up a phone line at the police office which is a dialing line and you could phone in and listen to the tape to you know determine for yourself if you recognized it the next day a woman calls the police she phoned our tips line and told one of the tip takers yeah this is i think that's my son's voice and he fishes at the vetter river and he went to tania smith's funeral she knew that could the murder have been turned in by his own mother we attended at his residence in atmosphere and treated him like we treated every other person of interest that had been surfaced through the investigation and i offered him the chance to come in to talk voluntarily and provide his fingerprints and provide a dna sample and he declined to do that the investigators are suspicious of his response we had very few people that did not cooperate anyone that was approached by the police as a suspect or a person of interest were very quick to cooperate to eliminate themselves because it was such a horrific crime against a child that no one wanted anything to do with that and we had some pretty hard-nosed criminals cooperate with us the police cannot force a citizen to provide a sample for dna analysis without a warrant signed by a judge macleod continues to investigate the suspect the man's name is terry driver he is married with two young children he works in a printing house and has no criminal record and his father is a retired police officer on the advice of his family terry driver agrees to give his fingerprints but nothing else accompanied by his lawyer he walks into the police station i rolled his prints but we'd been looking at that print so many times we had that ingrained in our mind we knew what we were looking for under normal circumstances i would have taken the print and gone back into my office but this was a little bit of a unique situation he had his lawyer there there was they wanted done right there at that that spot so i went into a small office that's normally occupied by the guard and closed the door but there's windows all around so you felt like you're in a bit of a fishbowl situation and they wanted me to make the comparison at that time there was a center portion of it that had a funny bit of a loop on it and we kind of had a nickname we dubbed to the hockey stick and that was kind of an area that we keyed in on right off the bat to look to see if that formation was there and when i compared the prints put the fingerprint glass on and started looking at some of the areas that we had keyed in on i could feel my heartbreak was accelerated and then of course when i looked at the print right off the bat it didn't take me very long and i knew that it was his print [Music] jerry ennis checks the print again he is confident that it is identical to the one found on the tape attached to the note signed by the killer [Music] the investigators have their first solid piece of evidence they can now build the case that terry driver is the abbotsford killer everything from tears in the eye the high fives and hooting hollering it was uh it was very very big relief off of everybody's shoulders you could tell weight of the world lifted off all of our shoulders because the bad guy was now at least in custody the threat was over when there's an arrest made as far as the police are concerned that's really when the work starts because now you're the clock is ticking to get ready for trial the police continued to collect evidence against him afterwards for example the the cell phone tracking evidence the bite mark comparison evidence was only available when police were able to get his dental impressions the dna from him was only available once police knew that it was his dna they needed to obtain it is now up to crown prosecutor neil mckenzie to prove that terry driver is guilty the trial charges him in connection with both victims attempted murder in the case of misty cockrell and first degree murder in the case of tanya smith before the court terry driver makes 20 admissions most surprisingly he admits to the rape and manslaughter of tanya smith mr driver's position was that he was he was guilty of a sexual assault and guilty of a manslaughter because he had put tanya smith's body in the river and she had drowned as a result and so the manslaughter would be as a result of his unlawful act of of putting her body in the river he claimed at that time that he believed that she was already dead and only realized later that that she had drowned when he heard news reports so then he realized that he was responsible for the death and that was why he according to him was guilty of manslaughter but not of murder i think what he said on the stand was that he has sex with tanya that's consistent with the evidence but then there's no direct evidence that says that he was the person that threw her in the river and in fact killed her because she drowned what went against that of course was the fact that he'd written a letter talking about a baseball bat and he had talked about being the one that took misty around to the front of the hospital and dropping her off and in fact he hadn't he hadn't done that justice opal came up with a number of reasons that he found his story not credible and he convicted it is almost exactly two years after the attack on the teenage victims terry driver is convicted of first-degree murder in the case of tanya smith an attempted murder in the case of misty cockrell he receives a life sentence with the possibility of parole after 25 years which is the minimum for first-degree murder at a separate trial terry driver is also found guilty of the three attacks that he confessed to in the note thrown through the window basically members of the team put their lives on hold for seven months and went after this case to investigate it and identify the killer these guys lived in the community we all lived in the community we all knew the threat and the threat was to our families as well and it was one of those cases that if it comes along once in your career that would be too much terry driver used water to become the abbotsford killer and forever left a scar on the community but for tanya and misty justice has been served

Channel: Real Crime

Views: 291,208

Keywords: real crime, crime documentary, true crime, full documentary, full episode, dark waters crime, eaux troubles du crime, search dogs, dark waters of crime full episodes, crime victim, crime investigation, Dark Waters Of Crime, mystery, murder victim, sexual assult victim, women safety, crime scene evidence, The Crime That Shook Canada, murders documentary, abbotsford killer, serial killer, serial killer documentary, murder documentary, creepy, canadian, true crime stories

Id: ecpazBaO1Hk

Length: 45min 42sec (2742 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 13 2021