THE TRAGIC MURDER OF LENA BRUCE

lena bruce's murder remained unsolved for 25 years numerous different police teams were dissecting evidence chasing up suspects but they couldn't find who did this to her then two decades later what happens in the dark must finally come to light so today's video is going to be another solved true crime case today we're going to be talking about the murder of lena bruce but before we get into the case i just want to thank our sponsors for making this video possible switchcraft switchcraft is a super spooky mystery game where you play as a young witch named bailey and you have to help solve the disappearance of your best friend bailey just moved to a modern witchcraft academy where you have to help her navigate her visions decipher messages that she gets from spirits complete levels of match 3 games to progress through the levels and unlock more and more information about your missing best friend one of the things that i personally love about switchcraft is the beautiful hand-painted aesthetic of all the graphics it really does feel like you're inside an interactive graphic novel with the really gripping story and the beautiful witchy art and not to mention the representation and diversity of the characters is unlike any other mobile game i've ever played there's so many different cultures races there's lgbt representation there's disabled representation switchcraft really is my new favorite mobile game at the moment i just find it so relaxing and i love uncovering more and more parts of the story with every level that i get through it's so rewarding so if you want to play switchcraft you can download it for free using the link down below in the description go solve the mystery yourself thanks again to switchcraft for sponsoring this video now before we get into it i just want to give my usual disclaimer that i mean absolutely no disrespect to anyone that i talk about in this video this video is for educational purposes and everything that i'm about to say is just information that i have found on the internet and i'm compiling into one video just a couple of content warnings before we get into it this case does involve themes of rape and sexual assault so if you don't want to watch anything that has that in it please do click out right now because your mental health is the most important thing i'm sure i can find you again at some other point with a different case that's maybe a bit more suitable for you but that being said let's just get into the case lena bruce was a 21 year old tufts graduate originally from north philadelphia she was born into a thriving black community in a small town named francisville and she was the youngest of five siblings so lena was the baby the neighborhood that lena and her siblings were raised in was such a lively one it was very multicultural everyone was very proud of their roots and who they were in this community everyone and anyone was accepted there for exactly who they were and it was just a great place for them to grow up although lena's family did struggle a little bit financially to be fair the whole neighborhood did this was quite a poor area but that being said with this kind of neighborhood spirit that they had if anyone was ever in trouble neighbours had their back everyone always had each other in this community growing up lena bruce was a force to be reckoned with she was a very ambitious driven hard-working young woman and to a point sometimes she would put a little bit too much pressure on herself i think it was almost like failure just wasn't an option for lena bruce to be honest average was barely even an option for lena bruce if she wasn't excellent at something she didn't want it she didn't want to be average she didn't want to fail she wanted to be the best of the best and when i'm talking about this determined spirit that she had it was mainly in the way of her work and her grades and like her schoolwork and stuff she was relatively competitive in other areas of her life as well although her studies were the thing that lena was the most passionate about in the whole world and i think the reason for this was because ever since lena was a child she'd always dreamed of being able to get a good education and then make enough money that she would be able to move her family out of the poverty-stricken area that they were in and her father bob was always so inspired by lena no one else in lena's family was like her i mean they were all hard workers but she was something special no one in their family had ever gone to university before but that was all that lena could talk about that's all that she wanted to do with her life was to get that education and get a great job and he really believed that she could do this as well that she could get herself out of the situation that their family was in some nights lena would sit and talk to her mother for hours about what she was gonna buy when she finally had money the kind of houses that they were all gonna live in the cars that they were gonna drive the the lives that they were gonna live one day but in order to get there lena bruce would need a college scholarship because her family just did not have the money to send her to university at all and she knew that she needed a university education for a chance to get this amazing job that she so dreamed of and so for that reason her family were very much banking on lena being awarded a scholarship and i suppose that just added to the pressure that she put on herself because if she didn't get offered a scholarship because her grades were that good then she could kiss college goodbye a whole lot was riding on this young woman she put a lot of pressure on herself and she just really wanted to do her best she just really wanted to do her family proud but great news lena bruce absolutely smashed her school in she got amazing grades and she was offered so many different scholarships to so many different colleges two of which were harvard and yale which are two of the best ivy league universities in the whole entire world ultimately though lena decided to go to tufts university which is in boston massachusetts and that was because they offered the best engineering course and that was exactly what lena wanted to do tufts is a great university don't get me wrong but at the time when she chose this everyone was quite surprised i mean she'd been offered harvard and yale and turned them down for tough to university again i'm not saying tough to university is a bad university it's actually a great university but it's not harvard and yale but lena didn't care she did not care about the reputation of her university she didn't care about name or status or anything like that she just cared about what value she was getting from her course and this university had the best course so of course she's going there so in 1988 lena bruce moves out of her family home in philadelphia and moves to boston massachusetts for tufts university and just like that lena was the first member of her family to ever attend university she was accepted with a full scholarship into the school of engineering and she was actually the only black woman on her whole course of like 250 students and it was during her freshman year of university that lena bumped into a girl that would soon become her best friend barbara eden saw lena bruce as she was walking across campus one day and she just ran up to her and said hi do you want to be my friend and lena just looked at her and laughed and said well do i have a choice here and thus began a beautiful friendship between lena and barbara the two of them came from very similar backgrounds so they really understood each other they both came from poverty and disadvantaged backgrounds i think they both had to get a scholarship to even be able to be in university but on top of that tufts university at the time in the 80s and 90s was predominantly white and barbara and lena were two of the very few black women that were actually there at the university so this only united them more they wanted to stick together because they had such a shared understanding they just got each other on a level that no one else would and barbara was just as ambitious as lena was her whole life again i think the ambition comes from a place of fear and need to get out of poverty which is sad but these were two very hard-working driven women i think barbara's family might have been quite dependent on her too just as leaners were on her and so the two women really helped each other to achieve their fullest potential while they were at this university they were such good influences on each other like they would study together if one of them started slacking off or getting distracted the other one would like snap him back into [ __ ] so as lena was settling into university she was just very happy with the life that she was creating for herself all of her friends that she was making the course that she was on she was really excited to just be around like-minded driven ambitious hard-working people just like herself because let's be honest to get into a university like this you need to be hard-working lena joined the delta sigma theta sorority and she got on really well with the rest of the sorority girls they would always plan events together especially with their brother fraternity as hard-working as lena was she loved to party she loved these events she loved all the frat parties she partied just as hard as she worked and it was at one of these frat parties where lena would meet the man that would soon become her boyfriend and his name was joe sullivan he was in the brother fraternity to lena's sorority and that's how she met him and he was just as equally driven hardworking ambitious as lena was he said that he was originally attracted to lena because she was so unique she was unlike any other woman that he'd ever met he'd never met a woman with the full package quite like what lena had she was ambitious hard-working sensible but she also loved to party she was the life of the party and she was physically beautiful as well he just felt like she had everything that he was looking for so the two of them started dating and then in 1992 when lena was 21 years old she graduated with honors with a degree in electrical engineering her whole family were just so incredibly proud of her they knew how much this moment meant to lena since she was a child and so they all traveled to boston they all had this big celebration together so she graduated and then the time was coming for her to move back home but lena didn't want to do that and neither did her best friend barbara and so the two of them decided that they were going to stay put in boston they liked it here they had tons of friends here their whole social life was here from university so why leave it so lena and barbara went out and found themselves an apartment in south boston it was a first floor apartment at 694 massachusetts avenue now this was quite a small quite cheap place it was a little bit run down but also the girls didn't really care because they were starting a new chapter of their lives after she graduated lena bruce was in high demand she was getting a lot of different job offers from loads of different engineering companies that really wanted her to work with them the job that she ended up accepting was with stone and webster engineering corporation which is apparently one of the best engineering corporations in boston but i wouldn't know so maybe it's not i don't know and lena's new colleagues were just so impressed with her already she hadn't been working there very long but one of them said that they saw excellent potential in her so anyway lena and barbara and now in this apartment they're super excited for this next chapter of their lives but there was this big overarching issue that the two women were all too aware of and that was the insanely high crime rates in the area that they just moved to there was a reason that this tiny little apartment was so cheap and that was because the area that it was in was so dangerous especially for two young women to be living alone there were more than a hundred murders per year in that area a hundred murders a year and that's not even counting the terrifying rape and robbery and assault statistics so the girls did all they really could do they just tried to stay educated stay alert stay looking after each other keep each other updated with where you are at all times that's all they could really do and although it was anxiety provoking to live in such an area the girls didn't let it get to them too much they kept their wits about them and they stayed positive for like i keep saying the next chapter of their lives on friday july 10th 1992 barbara eden was getting ready to go away for the weekend she was due back on the sunday so she was only going to be gone two days and lena was fine being home alone by herself for two days she enjoyed having time to herself to be fair and if worse came to worse then she could always invite her boyfriend round if she wanted some company or if she got lonely so when barbara left that afternoon lena went out onto the steps on their apartment and stood there waving her off as barbara drove off little did barbara know that would be the last time she would ever see lena bruce alive when she returned on the sunday barbara was super excited to run inside the house and find lena and tell her all about the weekend that she'd just had and said she did she ran straight inside ran straight to lena's room and started knocking on her door going lena i'm home i'm home but lena didn't come to the door she didn't shout back to her or anything like that and so barbara didn't think too much of it she thought well lena's probably just out right now so in the meantime barbara just grabs her bags and she starts heading back to her bedroom and that was when she realizes the mess that lena has left the apartment in over the last two days while she's been gone there were clothes thrown everywhere there was rubbish garbage everywhere and this was not like lena at all she was a very neat tidy responsible sensible person she wouldn't just leave the house like this but she'd also left every single window in the apartment wide open as well which wasn't like her and barbara was a little bit confused at this because both of the girls had an understanding where every time they left the house or even if they were just in there by themselves the windows would all be locked the door would be locked everything locked and so if lena was out which it seemed like she was at this point in time why had she left all the windows wide open that also wasn't like her in that moment a weird feeling creeped over barbara that something wasn't right here she didn't know what but she knew that something was not right and so she walked back to lena's bedroom and she knocked on the door again but again no answer at this point she was worried and so she decided to just open the door and just go in and check and when she did that was when she found her best friend lena bruce murdered in her own bedroom lena was lying face down on the bed with her hands tied behind her back with a telephone card she was also naked from the waist down and in this moment barbara just froze in complete shock she said that her brain just wasn't even registering what she was seeing she was just numb when she came to her senses a little bit she suddenly realized that lena was dead for sure she was very clearly dead and there was nothing that she or anyone else could do to be able to save her and this was a good realization for barbara to make because as soon as she did she ran straight out of the house she understood that that house was now a crime scene and the more things that she was touching and moving and walking around the harder it was gonna be for police to solve the murder of her best friend and so in the moment she's thinking very clearly and she's like right okay i need to get out of here she runs outside into the street and as she does a police car is actually passing by and so she flags them down and she tries to tell them this story she's very panicked but she tells this police officer to just come with her and she drags this police officer into her house and shows him what she'd just found the police officer immediately called for backup and soon this apartment was just swarming with detectives and forensics crime scene photographers and all barbara could do was just sit and watch she was actually called into the police station a few hours later by the crime scene photographer who wanted to ask her some questions about the apartment and the way that it had been found so they laid out all these pictures on the desk in front of her and they just said does anything seem off about the way that your apartment was found and that was when barbara spotted something on top of the tv in their living room was a glass bottle of beer now this had seemed quite insignificant to detectives at first however as soon as barbara saw that she was like no i know that that's not mine all leaners we don't drink beer neither of the women drank beer and to be fair they didn't drink fizzy drinks in general carbonated beverages and barbra sat and pointed out multiple different fizzy drinks cans and beer bottles in that apartment it was clear that someone other than barbara and lena had been inside that house consuming these products and leaving the rubbish and there was no innocent explanations for them either it's not like the girls had thrown a party and someone might have left a beer bottle behind or something because they'd only been in this apartment a couple of months they hadn't even thrown a party yet so all these bottles and cans were seized as evidence and detectives were hoping that they might be able to do some dna work on these and maybe extract a sample of the killer but when all these things were sent for testing it was found that there was just not enough dna on them like saliva dna on the cans for them to be able to find a person from it essentially so that was disappointing obviously because it looked like they were going to catch the killer straight away pretty much but the investigation continued on in fact the very next day the results of lena's autopsy came back her time of death was predicted to be in the early hours of saturday the 11th of july 1992 sir pretty much the same night that barbara had left her actual cause of death was from asphyxiation she'd been strangled with what detectives believed to be her killer's bare hands the pathologist concluded that the killer would have had to have been holding on to lena's neck for over two minutes for her to have actually died i know two minutes doesn't sound like long but when you're fighting for your life and struggling to breathe i'm sure that is a long time the pathologist actually believed that lena must have passed out around halfway through this so after about a minute however her killer just kept his hands there and made sure that he killed her even after this girl has stopped fighting back her body has gone limp she's stopped moving she stopped making noises and this man is still there squeezing his fingers around her neck making sure that she dies this is so callous the autopsy also confirmed that lena bruce was in fact raped by her attacker this was something that police had theorized since the beginning based on how lena's body was found she was naked from the waist down her hands tied behind her back face down on the bed stuff like that they had expected this but getting that confirmation was still horrific there was actually found to be very little self-defense wounds on lena's body like on her arms and stuff where she tried to get away and it was theorized that maybe this is because she was attacked from behind or maybe her attacker caught her off guard while she was asleep or you know while she had her back to him or something maybe she just didn't have enough time to realize he was there and then start defending herself you know so forensics took some swabs from lena's body as well as some dna that they found under her fingernails both of these dna profiles by the way the semen sample that they got in the swab and the dna under her fingernails were both of the same dna profile so they were both the killer but frustratingly both pieces of dna were just too small to actually run in the system and then be able to find an actual match all they could tell was that they were the same person and that that person was male so anyway over the next few days police decided to set up a bunch of interviews with the people that were closest to lena in her life because more often than not in murder cases the killer is someone that the victim knew in their life so police wanted to get to know the people around lena and see if any of them were suspicious at all and they started with her boyfriend joe sullivan joe knew that lena was gonna be home alone that weekend he knew that barbara was going away and so if he was gonna kill her now would be the perfect chance i suppose but joe told the police that he hadn't seen lena all weekend they hadn't met up all weekend and so barbara was actually the last person to ever see her alive on the friday when she left he said that he hadn't seen her all weekend but he was supposed to they did have plans for the saturday night but when the saturday rolled around lena never text him and so he just thought that she was canceling on him he just presumed that maybe she'd gotten busy maybe she had something on and she just completely forgot to text him because they were both very busy very hard-working individuals and it wasn't unusual that they would have to cancel a date or rearrange something here and there to be able to fit their schedules so he just thought that she'd forgotten he did text her and caller i think but she didn't get back to him again he just thought that she was busy and that she'd get back to him tomorrow but then when sunday rolled around she still didn't return any of his calls or texts and now he was getting worried but he didn't do anything yet he didn't get in contact with anyone and then it was the following morning that barbara got in contact with him to let him know how she'd found lena the day before and the police believed joe and everything that he was saying to them and so they ruled him out as a suspect he had a really good alibi that was actually confirmed by the police as well sir he was fully ruled out he wasn't the man that they were looking for but he was willing to help them in any way that he possibly could in this case because he was just so heartbroken over the loss of his girlfriend she meant the world to him and he wanted to do anything and everything that he could to help them in their investigation he told them everything he could about her police said that he would get really emotional and he would cry when he would talk about lena and they would offer him like do you want to take 10 minutes do you need a breather and the whole time he would be like no i don't need any breaks let's continue the questioning let's just get this case solved george just put his emotions aside put on a brave face and answered every question they needed him to because he wanted to get his girlfriend's killer behind bars so he was answering all these different questions about what kind of person lena was he said that she didn't have any enemies there was no one that disliked lena she was just a very likable person she was always very polite and kind even with like strangers and everyone like there was no one that didn't like her the next person that police questioned was barbara eden now they knew that she was aware over the weekend while lena was murdered but they still wanted to ask her some more like general questions they were asking her like everything about lena's life what she likes to do for fun who her other friends are what does she think about the area that she's just moved to this new apartment and that was when barbara mentioned the insanely high crime rates in the area and it was something that the girls were very anxious of and the police officer very much agreed to barbara that this was not a good place for two young women to be living alone which is insane has a policeman ever said no two young women shouldn't be living alone in this town if that doesn't tell you how unsafe the town is then i don't know what will and that was when barbara mentioned this other issue that she and lena had been having recently and that was with some groups usually young men either in their late teens or their early 20s these men would use lena's and barbara's fire escape on the side of their house to just go and sit and hang out and they would drink on there until like the early hours of the morning they would use it as like a hangout spot just the fire escape on the side of this woman's house the house backed onto i think it was quite a dodgy alley and a lot of the time people would go onto this alley just to stand and drink but then occasionally the people would help themselves to a seat on lena bruce's fire escape which i don't know if this is just because i'm in the uk and we don't have fire escapes like that here so i can't imagine what it would be like to look outside of your window and see people having a party on the side of your house it's just really strange like there's nothing you can do about it there's just people having a party a few feet outside your window and like you're not even invited either so as soon as the police heard this from barbara they knew immediately that they had to go and search that fire escape and so they ran down there and they found a few concerning pieces of evidence actually scattered on the floor around this fire escape was a man's wallet a bottle of baby oil and a pack of condoms and it didn't seem as though these items had been like buried or hidden or anything like that it looked like they'd just kind of been dropped by accident they were just kind of scattered very much in the open police immediately got the vibe that whoever had dropped them didn't know they'd dropped them otherwise they would have picked them up so the immediate theory of these items were that these were all belongings of lena bruce's murderer and maybe he had taken them into the apartment with him when he went to kill lena and then as he was escaping probably through the fire escape he dropped them and didn't realize so forensic teams were brought in and they dusted for fingerprints all over this fire escape all over lena's window but they found nothing the only fingerprints that they could find belonged to either lena or barbara there were no unidentified prints there anywhere so at this point in the case police felt like their best bet was to release all the information that they've got to the press and then that way they can report on it the public can hear about this case and then if any member of the public has any information hearing on the news might spark them to come forward to the police and that way they can get more leads so police put together a theorized version of events of what they think could have happened to lena bruce on the day that she was murdered they think that as soon as barbara left the house that day lena of course waved her off on the stairs and then she walked back in her apartment and realized just how hot it was that weekend it was insanely warm and it was very very humid that week so it's believed that that is when lena ran around the whole house and opened every single window the full weight just to let some air circulation through the house obviously this was fine for her to do because she was in the house but she never would have done this if she planned on leaving so police think that lena was just chilling by herself in the house that night when her attacker probably saw her through her bedroom window from that alleyway behind the house maybe when they saw the window wide open and the fire escape right underneath it maybe they saw their opportunity police at this point in the case couldn't be sure whether lena's murderer was an opportunistic killer as in like he just happened to be walking on the alleyway that day he saw the window open he saw the fire escape and then decided to take advantage or maybe the killer had actually been stalking lena for a few days before this point and maybe they saw barbara leave earlier in the day and then they decided to attack lena when they knew that she was home alone they couldn't decide which one was more likely at this point in time but either way they knew that that alleyway behind lena's home was going to be crucial for this investigation they really believed that it was probably one of those men that used to sit out there drinking on the fire escape that could have done this to her even if it wasn't one of those men police were still very interested to find those men and talk to those men because maybe they knew something but at this point in the case they had very little to go on literally the only piece of evidence really at the moment was an unusable dna profile that they can't test and they've tried and they can't even the wallet that they found on the fire escape i forgot to say this at the time but it didn't really have anything in it it only had like cash in it it didn't have a bank card with a name on it didn't have an id card in it so police were very much clutching at straws at this point in the case and going back to that theory that they thought it was probably someone that knew lena that killed her they decided to interview every single man that they could from lena's life that's ex-boyfriends co-workers um men or the men friends from university i don't know but nothing really came from many of these questionings i mean many of lena's male friends didn't actually live in boston anymore at the time of her murder because they'd all left when they graduated college so the police didn't really find any more leads here and it was at this point that police started coming to terms with the fact that they didn't have anything they didn't have any suspects they didn't have any leads they didn't have anything else to even investigate or try everything was a dead end and they were starting to consider filing lena's murder as a cold case because they didn't think that they could solve this and as soon as lena's family heard that the case had officially gone called they were enraged they felt like police weren't even trying like they didn't even want to help find lena's murderer one of the things that lena's family were most scared of here was that their daughter their loved one was just becoming another statistic the recent statistics for cold murder cases in boston were released in 2014 and the results of this are horrifying boston police managed to solve 79 of murder cases where the victim was a white male however when the victim was a black male this statistic goes down to 38 less than half a blatantly huge difference that absolutely disgusted lena bruce's family and they were terrified that the police just didn't care about their daughter just like they didn't seem to care about most black murder cases they tried desperately to get the case reopened they were protesting they were writing letters to the police officers but nothing happened the case was officially declared a cold case at this point and even the media coverage of lena's case at the time as it was happening you literally wouldn't have known that lena was murdered unless you lived in her town the media coverage of this case didn't go very far at all because lena's case wasn't on the news in the evenings it wasn't broadcasted on the radio it wasn't printed in the newspapers hardly it was only really printed when the police went to the media and urged them to post this story so that they could help them when the police wanted to post that theorized version of events they had to take it to the media and ask them because the media weren't coming to the police to report on lena's case and because there was insufficient media coverage of this case there were a lot of unfiltered rumors that started circulating both about lena's murder and just about lena as a person people spread rumors that lena was a prostitute and that it was probably one of her clients that murdered her which is just awful it's just an awful rumor to spread about someone that has just lost their life in the most brutal way and we don't even know how of course this rumor was a complete lie but the bruce family had no way of telling people that they had no way of defending lena because they just didn't have a platform to do so they couldn't go on the news they couldn't you know talk to a journalist because no one was giving this case any publicity so now that the case had been categorized as a cold case and the bruce family are not happy at all they feel like the police have given up way too soon and they weren't ready to give up yet they decided to keep the investigation going even if it meant that they had to be the ones running it so one of lena's sorority sisters along with her mother organized a huge search of lena's apartment they were getting every single friend family member that they could involved in this search and they were going to search lena's apartment themselves in case they could find anything that the police missed they didn't end up finding anything as part of this search but this was actually the first time that bob bruce had been to lena's new apartment ever since she moved out with barbara by herself and bob was just so shocked like he knew that the area was rough and that the crime rates were bad but he had no idea that it was this bad he even said in an interview if i'd have seen this place before lena would not have been living here bob bruce very much blamed himself for lena's murder for quite a while because of this because he'd let her move to this town that he had no idea how dangerous it was he just always felt that like if he'd just done his research on the place that his daughter was moving and maybe intervened then this wouldn't have happened and maybe lena would still be alive today but things only get even worse if that's even possible as we progress through this case one of lena's friends even described this whole ordeal and the whole investigation as just tragedy after tragedy so the time was coming for lena's funeral and her mother had spent so much time planning the absolute best send-off she possibly could for her daughter it was gonna be an open casket funeral so that everyone could say their final goodbyes to lena her mother had even gone out and bought her a beautiful black dress so that she could dress her in it in her casket so she looked nice but when she got there the staff informed her that there had been a bit of an issue and that was that they would no longer be able to go ahead with the open casket funeral it turned out that some of the staff members had not properly taken care of lena bruce's body and they had allowed her to start decomposing the team knew that this was an open casket funeral they knew that they had to preserve this body i don't know exactly what they do to it but they knew what they had to do but they didn't do it and this ruined everything for lena's funeral it's so heartbreaking to think about that her family had gone through enough and now the final goodbye that they were planning someone goes and messes that up as well so the funeral took place and now lena bruce's case is officially a cold case and everyone's lives just had to go back to normal now whatever normal is without lena in 1996 four years after lena's murder joe sullivan her ex-boyfriend found himself walking through boston one night when he ended up on massachusetts avenue where lena used to live so he decided to walk down to 694 and stand outside lena's old apartment and just think about it for a minute and remember all the good times that he used to have with her but very quickly those good memories were crushed by the feelings of anger and frustration that her case hadn't been solved joe was furious that some random man out there had taken the love of his life from him and at the moment this man was just getting away with it he felt these feelings bubbling up inside him and he just breathed through them and he was just thinking there's nothing i can do as frustrating and upsetting and heartbreaking as this is there is nothing i can do to solve this kiss and so he decided to just try and get on with his dare and get it out of his mind but then later that evening joe sullivan goes back home and he's watching tv and that was when a show comes on of boston police solving cold cases now these weren't the same boston police that were on lena bruce's case in fact the detective that was on this show was called sergeant william dugan and he was a brilliant detective this show was all about him solving all these cold cases in boston that had been cold for years just like lena's had and joe sullivan felt as though this was a sign that this was on tv on the one day that he accidentally found himself walking along lena bruce's street he then goes home and sees a tv show about them solving cold murder cases in boston he just felt like this was a sign from the universe so joe wasted no time and he got in contact with detective dugan from the show he told him all about lena bruce's murder and dugan was willing to work on it with him and so he set up a meeting for him and all of the cold care squad to get in on this and joe was so excited about this he finally felt like they could make progress in this case like they could finally find lena's murderer and so the first thing he did was got in contact with lena's family who he hadn't spoken to in a while and he just told them he's been in contact with this detective the detective is now working on the case and this might lead somewhere but lena's family didn't sound as excited as joe was and they told him that that was because most of these cold cases that you see being solved years and years later they're virtually always white victims and there's very few exceptions to the rule there's very few black cases that go called and then get reopened and solved later on the bruce family were just very skeptical about any detectives and police at this point which is understandable because they had had such a horrible experience with the police more so than what i've even gone into in this video because i don't know 100 the details and i don't like to speak on things that i'm not aware of but i know that there was quite a fight between the bruce family and the police trying to get this case reopened and the police just weren't listening but yeah the bruce family were just not very confident in detective dugan and this new approach but at the same time they knew that this was literally their only chance and that this was better than nothing than just keeping the case cold and so they decided to send the case over to detective dugan and as soon as dugan received it he was so eager to get to work he was really excited to get on this one the first thing he decided to do in this case was to go back to those old dna profiles and all the swabs and stuff that they'd taken from her autopsies and he was going to try to retest these because now it was 1996 lena had been murdered in 1992 and even though that's only a four-year difference technology improved leaps and bounds in that time he took the dna sample from these swabs this killer's dna and he put it in curtis which is the combined dna index system or something like that this is essentially what i talk about when i'm talking about the database in videos when i'm talking about the database it's usually the uk one because we don't have codice over here curtis is specific to america but it's basically the same thing it's a huge dna database of loads of different criminals dna violent criminals dna and so if you've got someone's dna you can run it on the system on the database and it'll come up if they've got a match in the system kudis specifically was set up by the fbi i think it's a fbi thing that they use and it's split into two different parts so part one that is full of dna samples from non-violent criminals so when they catch someone for doing something violent a violent crime they will take a dna sample put it in curtis put it in the part one section whereas the second part of the database is unidentified dna samples from crime scenes so like the swabs from lena bruce's body where they don't know who it is but they know it's someone that's done a violent crime they're gonna store it in part two for now and hope that at some point a match will come in part one and then they'll be able to say ah it was that person that did that crime the two parts of the database can also be compared as well so that's why it's super important to be taking dna samples in a case like lena bruce's where you don't know who the killer is because one day maybe the killer will commit another violent crime his dna will then get put on cordis and then you'll get a notification saying whoa just found a match to this crime scene over here so dugan uploads this dna sample to curdis for the very first time they hadn't been able to upload it to curtis at the time in 1992 so they had no idea if this was going to work or not he gets the dna sample in the system but there's no match lena bruce's killer clearly hadn't committed or been caught for any other violent crimes before so this was going to be quite hard it just seemed like setback after setback in this case it truly was this is one of the most frustrating cases i've ever had to read so now all they could really do was just like sit around and maybe wait for the killer to commit another violent crime so then he would get put on cordis but like they can't do that forever what they're just gonna wear and hope this man is violent again that's not that's not a very good plan i don't think so dugan came up with one of the most ingenious plans i've ever heard in a true crime case i love this bit so much and i know that you guys are gonna love this too so dugan was still pretty sure that lena was probably murdered by someone that knew her he was still very much in that theory that it must have been one of the men in her life and so he decided to try and extract a dna sample from every single one of these men so that he could test it against the dna that they had of the killer but how was he going to get all of these different men's dna samples without them suspecting anything and this is where the plan comes in dugan sent each of these men a letter in the mail that essentially just said you're a winner you've won this prize all you have to do is send the return envelope to this address with your details in and we'll get in contact and send you your prize the catch was that prepared envelope that the men would have to send their details in was a lick and stick envelope so they would have to lick it to be able to stick it closed and then that is how dugan was gonna get their dna he was gonna take all these envelopes take him to the lab extract the dna and then test it against the ones found in the case it's brilliant it sounds like something out of a cartoon i love detective dugan and actually most of the men replied which i was quite surprised at but then i remembered it was the 1990s and maybe scams weren't as much of a thing then but like if you got a letter in the post these days saying you're a winner you've run a prize where no one would believe it no one and all of these men that had sent back the prepared envelope had licked and sticked the envelope so dugan was excited he was like running to the lab with all these envelopes testing them all but there was no match none of these men were lena bruce's murderer and just like that the case was cold again there was nothing else that detective dugan could really do he'd eliminated every single suspect that they had so i suppose it was progress but they were no closer to finding a killer detective dugan agreed to keep hold of this case although there was nothing more that he could really do at the time there was no other evidence to look through they'd done absolutely everything with everything that they had in the coming years both lena's mother and her father both passed away without ever having known what happened to their daughter without seeing her ever get justice and this case almost ended there but then in 2004 so 23 years after the murder of lena bruce police finally got that notification that they were waiting for a new dna profile had just been uploaded to curtis and it was an exact match to the dna that was found at lena bruce's crime scene lena bruce's murderer had finally been found after two decades police all rushed to their computers to find out more about this man that had somehow gotten away with murder for 23 years now his name was james witkowski at this point in the case he was 42 years old but at the time of lena's murder he would have been 19. he was a petty criminal with loads of previous charges on smaller things though like robbery and drugs and assault fighting things like that nothing big enough to have ever gotten put in jail though he only really got like community service or probation and stuff like that but now in 2013 he's been caught and dna swabbed so it means he must have been jailed for one of his crimes well it turns out the one crime that tripped him up was violating the terms of his probation this man had literally gotten away with murder for almost 25 years and then got tripped up on violating his probation this violation meant that he would have to go to jail for a very very short sentence like it was a tiny sentence but that was enough to mean that he had his dna sample taken it got put on the system and a match was found so james witkowski is brought in for an interrogation and he is playing dumb through the whole thing he's saying he don't know who lena is he's never heard of a murder he doesn't know anything about this police then grabbed a picture that they had of lena and barbara on their graduation and they showed it to james wikkowski and they said do you recognize either of these women james looked at the picture he said he might recognize barbara maybe he'd seen her at the park before but lena he said he didn't recognize her in fact full quote i don't know her she's pretty though so then police hand him another picture this time it's a picture of the front of the girl's apartment on massachusetts avenue are you familiar with this area um hang on over here to drink right on the steps right on the steps you know police asked wikkowski if he'd ever heard of any murders happening on that street or you know in that area if he knew of anyone that had been murdered and he said no which i find kind of hard to believe considering there were like 100 murders a year in that area and he lived there and hung out there and i don't know but anyway now the detectives are just getting bored with james witkowski and they want to start cracking down on him further and they know obviously at this point that they've got matching dna to him so they know that he's the killer but he doesn't know that they know that he's the killer they start hinting towards the dna evidence that they found asking him if he'd ever slept with a woman named lena bruce and this was his response you ever have sex with lena brooks i said i had sex with a lot of girls a lot of them man i hear you know never make no chicken there no rape nobody are you kidding me okay he's essentially saying that he's had sex with so many different women that how can he possibly remember if he slept with one called lena bruce because he slept with a lot of them he then goes on to tell detectives that he likes to engage in rough bondage sex with these women when they ask for it um he goes into a bit too much detail to be fair the police officers were asking for the detail he was telling the officers about how him and his best friend juice sometimes go to girls houses and like they'll both tie up the girls and then they'll both have sex with the girls and then they'll leave them there tied up like that because it's all just part of it you know what i mean the submissive part of it they'll just leave him after they're done with him i don't know he told police this in an interrogation about a murder by the way but it was that little comment that whitkowski made about how they used to leave the girls there tied up that really piqued police interest because remember how lena's body was left she was still tied up she was still naked from the waist down it seemed that her killer had enjoyed doing that to her too and i hate to say it but james witkowski played this interview very well like he told the police just enough that he might have had sex consensual sex with a woman named lena bruce wonder and that would explain all the dna evidence that police had against him so now if they were to try and take him to court on this dna evidence alone the case would just fall apart because he would have somewhat of a defense it might not be the strongest defense he could still be found guilty of murder who knows but there's always the chance that he might not be because he's got this excuse now and it was at this point in the interview as well that police were starting to get annoyed at wikkowski because he was getting really cocky with them and he was saying stuff like oh you just need to look harder if you want to find the killer you need to keep looking coming out of this interrogation investigators knew that they needed more supporting evidence that they couldn't get away with just this dna evidence now they needed something else alongside it for a slam dunk case so they decided to go back and have a look through all the evidence pieces once again for a third time and finally this time they actually found something officers looked inside the wallet that they'd found on the fire escape and inside it were loads of tiny little scraps of paper like little bits off receipts and you know just little bits of paper that gets stuck in your pocket or your wallet at the time in 1992 when lena was first murdered and the police first found this wallet they didn't think much about these pieces of paper in fact they ignored them completely but now the police were desperate and so they were willing to test on anything and everything that they had so they pulled out all these tiny little crumples of paper and they painstakingly tested every single one of them and believe it or not one of them had a full fingerprint on it that had been preserved now for 23 years and this fingerprint was an exact match to james wikkowski's left thumb and this was exactly that supporting piece of evidence that the police needed to be able to charge this man with lena's murder they finally had her killer but as exciting as this was it was also a very bittersweet moment because well i mean these pieces of paper had been lying there for 23 years now this murder could have been solved at any time had police just looked at those pieces of paper had the police in 1992 been doing their job properly this case could have actually been solved the same week it happened because james witkowski's fingerprints had always been on file i don't know why probably for all his like robbery charges and stuff like that his dna hadn't been on file this whole time but his fingerprints had always been there had they found this fingerprint and put it on the system they would have got a match straight away so finally police had their killer and they believed that james wikkowski had been one of those men that used to loiter on lena's fire escape every night and drink he literally admitted in his interrogation that he was one of those men but we still have the same issue now as we had earlier on in the case that we just don't know why because james still denies that he had anything to do with this even the the dna is there in it but anyway because he won't admit it police don't know if this was a crime of opportunity like he just happened to be walking past one day when he saw the window open so he broke in and raped and murdered her or maybe james witkowski had been stalking lena bruce for some time before he struck and this is actually the theory that most police side with in this case and that is that maybe james witkowski had been watching lena for a few days he saw barbara leave for her trip with big bags he knew that she was going to be away for a while and then maybe he took that opportunity when he knew that lena was now home alone to climb in through the fire escape and do this to her finally they could charge james witkowski with first-degree murder and 25 years after the actual crime lena's case was finally going to trial but nothing was ever straightforward for this case was it there's always a spanner in the works and that rings true for the trial as well so the medical examiner that had performed the autopsy on lena bruce had now passed away obviously it had been 25 years so they had to find a new medical examiner who could look at the old medical examiner's notes and present them to the court which sounds easy but in actual practice it's not because this new medical examiner is presenting an autopsy of a body that they never even saw so now in court they're going to be asked questions and stuff how are they supposed to answer them effectively when they didn't even see the body of course they can't get lena's body back and autopsy again like that can't happen but this new medical examiner actually did a really good job given the circumstances they were a really powerful part of this trial the new medical examiner stood up there in court and explained to everyone just how long it would have taken james witkowski to murder lena bruce it took 60 seconds for her to pass out from when he put his hands around her neck and so this medical examiner made everyone in the car sit there in silence for 60 seconds so that they could feel how long lena bruce was fighting for her life after this the jury deliberated for three days and then finally came back to find james wikkowski guilty of the murder of lena bruce in 2017 james witkowski was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole and in june of this year 2021 he actually tried to appeal his case of course it was rejected and he remains in prison to this day and probably will forever as difficult as this case was for me to research i've never been filled with so much satisfaction at the end of a case after seeing all the heartbreak that her family and loved ones went through for 25 years honestly to hear that they made an arrest and that they got this man in jail for murdering lena it's the best news ever thanks again to switchcraft for sponsoring this video remember if you want to download the game for free you can do so using the link down below in the description huge thank you to all of my channel members for helping me decide the cases that i cover especially my tier 2 members whose names are all on screen right now if you want to become a channel member you can just click the join button on a desktop or there'll be a link in the description of this video but yeah thank you so so much for watching if you enjoyed please leave a thumbs up down below because that would really help me out if you want to subscribe there's a link to do so right here if you want to subscribe to my second channel there's a link here and if you want to watch another true crime video there's another playlist on screen right now oh i've run out of breath bye

Channel: Eleanor Neale

Views: 928,363

Keywords: eleanor, neale, eleanor neale, eleanor neale true crime, mystery, unsolved, unsolved mystery, true crime, solved, documentary, killer, murder, serial killer, buzzfeed, buzzfeed unsolved, podcast, true crime podcast, itv, netflix, storytime, forensic files, interview, lena bruce, lena, bruce, true crime daily, james witkowski, cold case, cold case solved, solved cold case, cold murder case, unsolved murder, unsolved case, finally solved, 20 years, 25 years, solved after 20 years

Id: cp43CvCtcwM

Length: 55min 31sec (3331 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 12 2021