6 Cold Cases Solved by Twists No One Saw Coming

Before sunrise, a young college student pulled away from an airport curb in Oklahoma. Her roommate had just watched her drive off. That was the last ordinary moment. A few hours later, people at her apartment complex heard a scream from the parking lot. Not a small scream, not someone laughing. A scream that made one resident call 911 and say his wife had heard something awful outside.

By lunchtime, the student was gone. Her car was gone. And the people who loved her were about to learn that a normal morning had turned into the start of a case that would sit cold for years. But this story is not only about one case. It is about seven. Seven cold cases that looked stuck. Seven investigations where police followed leads, interviewed suspects, chased theories, and at times believed they were close.

 In some of these cases, the wrong person looked guilty. In one case, a man confessed and still turned out to be innocent. In another, a man was already in prison while the same kind of crimes kept happening outside. In another, the answer was sitting inside an evidence bag waiting for science to catch up. That is what makes these cases disturbing.

The truth was not always hidden far away. Sometimes, it was already in the file. Sometimes, it was on a piece of clothing. Sometimes, it was inside a phone record. Sometimes, it was in a witness’s memory. And sometimes, the person everyone should have looked at first was the person who slipped past them.

 The first case begins with Julie Busken. Julie was living in Oklahoma City in 1996. She had been raised in Benton, Arkansas, and moved to Oklahoma to study at the University of Oklahoma. She worked at the university golf course, and she was moving toward a future that made sense for her. She was earning her degree in dance.

 She wanted to open a studio one day and teach children how to dance. People who knew Julie described her as talented, social, and well-liked. She had friends. [clears throat] She had plans. She had a life that was moving forward. On December 19th, 1996, Julie spent the evening with her friend Ryan James at his grandparents’ house. Ryan worked with her at the golf course.

They had dinner, watched a movie, and made plans to have lunch the next day. Around 10:00 at night, Julie left and went to meet other friends. That night was not supposed to be dangerous. Julie and her friends played Monopoly. They exchanged Christmas gifts. The semester had ended, and Julie was supposed to move back home the next day.

Her roommate, Megan, was also there, and Julie promised to give Megan a ride to Will Rogers Airport early the next morning. Instead of sleeping, Julie and Megan pulled an all-nighter. They left the friends’ house around 2:00 in the morning and went to a restaurant called The Kettle. After that, they stopped for gas and cappuccino.

They returned to their apartment after 3:00 a.m. so Megan could get her belongings. A little later, they headed to the airport. Julie dropped Megan off around 5:00 in the morning. Megan watched her drive away in her red Eagle Summit. That image matters because it is the final confirmed moment where Julie was still moving through the world like any other young woman heading home after a long night.

Around 5:30 a.m., residents at the Dublin West Apartments heard a woman scream. One resident called 911. He said his wife had heard a strange, awful scream from the parking lot. He had not gone outside because he was afraid. That fear was not irrational. Hours later, Ryan James arrived at Julie’s apartment for the lunch they had planned. Julie was not there.

 Her car was missing. Ryan reported her missing. Not long after that, Julie’s parents arrived from Arkansas to help her move home. Instead of finding their daughter, they found police officers. 12 hours after Julie disappeared, her body was found on the bank of a lake about 15 miles from her apartment. Her hands had been tied behind her back with shoelaces. She had been shot once.

Investigators also found evidence that she had been assaulted. Near her body, police found possible footprints in the sand. Two sets went down toward the lake. Only one set came back. One set appeared to belong to Julie. The other, investigators believed, belonged to the person who killed her. They consulted Nike and determined the print was consistent with a size nine men’s Nike running shoe, specifically a Nike Air 2 running shoe.

About 20 feet from Julie’s body, investigators found a crumpled pink leotard with her initials on the label. That leotard had male DNA on it. At the time, the evidence could not solve the case by itself, but it was saved. That decision mattered. Police looked into Julie’s life. They interviewed friends.

 They searched for someone who disliked her, someone angry, someone rejected, someone with a reason. They did not find a clear enemy. Her apartment showed no signs of a struggle. Then investigators found her car. It was parked at an apartment complex only one block away from where she lived. That detail made the case feel even stranger.

If someone abducted Julie, drove her to a lake, killed her there, then why bring her car back so close to where the abduction happened? Why take that risk? Why return to the area? Inside the car, investigators found red sand on the floor. It looked similar to the sand near the lake, but there were no useful fingerprints, no foreign hairs, no foreign fibers, and no clear signs of a struggle.

Then came the phone records. After Julie was already dead, someone made two calls from her phone. One call was to a weather forecast line. The other was to a number that was not in service at the time. That sounds small at first, but years later, that wrong number would become one of the most haunting details in the case.

Police had a sketch, too. About a month after Julie was killed, a man came forward and said that on the night of the crime, he saw a car like Julie’s pull out in front of him near the lake. They almost collided. He followed the car for about 5 miles because he wanted to confront the driver. The driver kept looking back through the rearview mirror, then sped off.

The witness saw enough for police to create a composite sketch. The driver was described as a young man, possibly a college student, possibly Hispanic, with long black hair and a muscular build. The sketch aired in Oklahoma. Nobody came forward with the name that solved it. The case went cold. Then, 4 and 1/2 years later, police received a letter from a female inmate at the Oklahoma County Jail.

 She said an old acquaintance might be responsible. His name was Dennis Stermer. He was 23 years old, worked in construction, had no criminal record, and had lived only a few blocks from Julie’s apartment at the time. He also resembled the sketch. For a moment, the investigation seemed to have found its path.

 Stermer refused to answer questions. He refused to provide DNA. Police got a court order. His DNA profile came back close to the sample from the leotard. Close, but not a match. That is the kind of twist that crushes a case because close sounds like the answer. Close makes people lean forward. Close makes families think the wait might finally end.

But close is not justice. Investigators then looked at Sturmer’s brother because the DNA similarity suggested a possible male relative. His brother did not match either. The case went cold again. Investigators kept going. Over 200 men were tested. Nothing broke the case. Then, 6 years after Julie was killed, a man named Anthony Castillo Sanchez was arrested in an unrelated case involving an assault on his girlfriend.

 Because of that arrest, he had to provide a DNA sample. Investigators saw his background and started connecting details. He had lived about 1 mile from Julie’s apartment. One of his girlfriends had a diary entry from the month Julie was killed. In that entry, she wrote that Anthony had bought her a pair of Nike running shoes and bought himself a pair, too. Sanchez wore a size 9 shoe.

That matched the type and size of the shoe print police had been tracking since the beginning. Then came the phone detail. One of Anthony Sanchez’s exes had a phone number that was one digit off from the number dialed from Julie’s phone after she was dead. That is the kind of detail that sits in your mind. If that call was made by the killer, and if he was trying to call someone from memory, then one wrong digit helped keep him hidden.

Then investigators looked at the gun evidence. Sanchez and his father had a habit of firing .22 caliber guns inside the house they rented. Investigators collected a bullet from the house. It was determined to have come from the same gun used to kill Julie. Finally, in 2004, Anthony Sanchez’s DNA was compared to the male DNA found on Julie’s leotard. It matched.

Sanchez was 18 years old when Julie was killed. He was convicted in 2006 and sentenced to death. In the years that followed, he claimed his father was responsible, not him. His father died in 2022. Investigators had already examined the possibility that the DNA belonged to the father, and that was not supported by the evidence.

Anthony Sanchez was executed in Oklahoma on September 21st, 2023. The twist in Julie’s case was not one thing. It was the phone call, one digit away. It was the suspect whose DNA came close, but not close enough. It was the leotard that waited years for technology to become strong enough. And it was the fact that the person responsible had been there in the background, close to where Julie lived, while investigators spent years trying to make the wrong lead fit.

Which detail would stay with you more? The phone call, the car being returned, or the DNA that sat waiting for years? Put it in the comments, because this first case sets up the pattern for everything that follows. Because the next case had the answer sitting on top of the victim. Not hidden, not buried deep in a lab report, right there, in a pair of men’s jeans.

In 1984, Murfreesboro, Tennessee was known for history, growth, and Middle Tennessee State University. But on May 31st of that year, a farmer on his way home made a discovery in a field. He saw clothing lying out in the open. When he got closer, he saw the body of a young woman underneath. She was 18-year-old Laura Salmon.

Laura was a local college student at Middle Tennessee State University. She also worked as a cashier at Kroger. On the day she died, she started at work. Records showed she left around 1:00 p.m. After that, she was supposed to go to the university to check her grades and meet with office personnel. She also planned to go swimming at her grandmother’s house.

 She never made it to the university. She never made it to her grandmother’s. Her body was found miles away. The scene gave investigators one major clue. Laura had been covered with clothing, including two pairs of jeans. One pair belonged to her. The other pair was men’s jeans. Those men’s jeans would become the center of the case.

Investigators found male DNA on them from a different man than the person Laura had been intimate with before her death. That mattered because it suggested the jeans likely belonged to the attacker. But in 1984, DNA testing was still young. Police could preserve the evidence, but they could not use it the way investigators would today.

They built a timeline instead. Laura’s car was found near the Kroger store, miles away from where her body was found. Police did not find useful foreign fingerprints in the car, but they did find a foreign hair. They also found dirt in the wheel wells. The FBI lab determined there was a high probability that Laura’s car had been on the road near the crime scene.

That meant someone likely took Laura to the field, killed her, then drove her car back near her workplace. That part felt familiar. Just like Julie Busken’s car, Laura’s car had been returned near the beginning of the day’s timeline. Investigators believed the person responsible may have known Laura. Witnesses placed Laura at a local nightclub the night before she died, dancing with an unidentified young man.

Police could not find him. The area where Laura was found was known as a place where young people went to park, hang out, and party. One theory formed around that unknown young man. Maybe Laura met him at the nightclub. Maybe they went to the area together. Maybe something happened there. But that lead did not become a case.

Police also looked at Laura’s high school boyfriend, David Kyle Gilly. He was known as jealous, but he had an alibi. His stepfather said David had been home all day when Laura was killed. That was enough to move him aside. But that decision would come back years later. Another lead came from a woman in Nashville.

 She called police and said she had been assaulted by a man named John Taylor. During that assault, she said Taylor told her he would do the same thing to her that he did to Laura. That was serious. Police looked into Taylor. He had attended the same university as Laura. He belonged to the same health club. He went to some of the same fraternity gatherings and functions.

He was near the university the day Laura died. He also had a history of violence toward women. Then FBI analysts compared Taylor’s hair to the foreign hair found in Laura’s car. The report said the hair was consistent with Taylor’s. That sounds strong. But it was not strong enough. At the time, hair comparison did not mean a unique match.

 The hair could have fit a large part of the population. Investigators could not arrest him based on that. And there was another problem. The men’s jeans at the crime scene had a 36-in inseam and a 30-in waist. Taylor was a smaller man. The jeans would not have fit him. Again, a lead that looked promising started to collapse. Years passed.

 More than 100 suspects were considered. Nothing held. Laura’s mother, Laureen Mackey, made a promise at Laura’s grave. She promised she would see justice done. She did not know how that promise would be kept, but it was the last thing she felt she could still do for her daughter. Then one of Laura’s old friends became part of the answer.

Dan Goodwin had known Laura at the university. He had gone out with her a few nights before she died. After graduation, he became a newspaper reporter at the Daily News Journal in Murfreesboro. He became the police reporter. He wrote about unsolved cases, including Laura’s. Then he left journalism and became a police officer.

The first cold case he was assigned was Laura’s. That is not only a twist. That is the kind of full circle moment no writer needs to exaggerate. Dan started by sending evidence back to the lab for new testing. DNA technology had advanced. Then he followed old leads. One lead involved a man named David Patterson.

 A high school student had claimed that his father killed a girl in 1984 and dumped her body. Patterson had died by the time Dan looked into it, but DNA from his children ruled him out. Dan went back to John Taylor, the earlier suspect. His DNA did not match. Dan even gave his own DNA sample. He was ruled out, too. Then Dan looked again at the name from the beginning, David Gilly.

The high school boyfriend. The one ruled out because of an alibi. Dan found a witness who contradicted that alibi. The witness said she saw Gilly driving Laura’s car on the day her body was found near the road that led to the crime scene. She described him as staring straight ahead with a blank expression.

 She identified him through a photo lineup. She also identified Laura’s car. Dan also learned more about Gilly’s history with Laura. According to the source material, he had been violent toward her. He had grabbed her, hit her, and on one occasion broke two of her front teeth. Now the old alibi looked weaker. The old suspect looked stronger.

 And the men’s jeans mattered again. David Gilly was about 6’2. The jeans found at the crime scene would have fit him. Dan brought in crime scene reconstruction help. Tiny drops of blood were found on the jeans. The blood pattern suggested the person wearing them had been kneeling close to Laura during the attack. The blood on the jeans was Laura’s.

That confirmed what investigators had long suspected. Those jeans belonged to the person responsible. Dan tracked Gilly to Florida. Gilly denied involvement. But when investigators said they believed the owner of the jeans was the killer, he made a strange admission. He said the jeans were probably his. Then he asked for an attorney.

On May 31st, 2000, exactly 16 years after Laura was killed, investigators obtained a saliva sample from Gilly. DNA testing showed he was the donor of the male DNA found at the scene. He was arrested. In 2006, David Gilly was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. The believed motive was jealousy.

Investigators believed Gilly could not accept Laura moving forward with college life, new people, and a life that did not belong to him. The twist was not only that the ex-boyfriend did it. The twist was that he had been there in the beginning. The system looked at him, accepted an alibi, and moved on. For years, investigators searched outward.

 But the answer was in the jeans. And the jeans were there from day one. Then came a case that changed forensic history. A case where police had a confession, a detailed confession, a confession that seemed to explain everything. And then DNA said no. In 1983, in the village of Narborough in Leicestershire England, 15-year-old Lynda Mann left home to walk to a friend’s house.

 She promised her mother and stepfather she would be home by 10:00 p.m. By midnight, she was still gone. Her parents called police and searched through the night. The next morning, a hospital porter found her body. At first, he thought he had seen a mannequin. Lynda had been assaulted and strangled. The village was horrified.

 Parents warned girls to walk in groups. Investigators searched the area, including attention on a psychiatric hospital located nearby, but nothing useful led them to the person responsible. During the autopsy, male biological evidence was collected. At the time, testing showed the man had type A blood, which narrowed the field, but not enough.

 About 10% of adult men in England could fit that result. For 3 years, the case remained unsolved. Then, in 1986, it happened again. 15-year-old Dawn Ashworth left work at a newsagent shop in Enderby and headed toward a friend’s house in Narborough. She was supposed to be home by 7:00 p.m. She was last seen around 4:40 p.m. By evening, her parents were terrified.

They were thinking about Lynda Mann. A few days later, police found Dawn’s body in a field near 10 Pound Lane. She had also been assaulted and strangled. Testing showed the attacker had the same blood type as the man who killed Lynda. The similarities were too strong to ignore. Both victims were 15.

 Both were walking alone. Both were found near footpaths. Both had attended the same school. The village understood what that meant. Someone had done it again. Police set up a mobile incident room and took calls from the public. One lead involved a motorcycle and a young man in a red crash helmet. Another lead led to a 17-year-old kitchen porter from Carlton Hayes Hospital, the psychiatric hospital near both crime scenes.

His name was Richard Buckland. Buckland approached a police constable and said he had seen Dawn walking on the day she disappeared. Then another piece of information came in from Buckland’s friend. The friend said Buckland had visited him and said Dawn’s body had been found near a hedge, near a gate, by the M1 bridge.

The problem was timing. Buckland said this before police had found Dawn’s body. He also gave details that sounded close to the truth. Dawn was not hanging from a tree, as he reportedly said, but her body had been concealed under tree limbs and debris near an access gate. Police arrested him. Buckland gave inconsistent statements.

Then, during a third interview, he gave a detailed confession. He included information that had not been released publicly. That should have ended the case. But investigators heard about a new technique being developed by Dr. Alec Jeffreys at Leicester University. It was called genetic fingerprinting. It had been used in an immigration case and a paternity dispute, but it had not been used this way in a criminal case.

Investigators already believed Buckland was responsible for Dawn’s murder. They also suspected he may have killed Linda. They sent the evidence for testing. Then came the result no one expected. Buckland was innocent. DNA showed he had not killed Linda Mann, and he had not killed Dawn Ashworth. But the same DNA also showed something critical.

The same unknown man had killed both girls. So, DNA did not only clear an innocent suspect, it proved the police were chasing one offender. Richard Buckland became the first person exonerated through DNA profiling. That is a moment worth sitting with. Police had a confession. Police had details. Police had a suspect who seemed to know too much.

 And science still proved he was not the killer. Investigators later believed Buckland may have come across Dawn’s body before police did, which may explain why he knew details. That part is important because it shows how dangerous a confession becomes when it is treated as stronger than physical evidence. After Buckland was cleared, the investigation changed.

 Inspector Derrick Pierce reviewed messages from the public. One message pointed to a man named Colin Pitchfork. His name had come up before in the Lynda Mann investigation because he had no alibi and had a prior record for flashing. But at the time, police believed he had moved to the village after Lynda was killed, so the lead did not receive special focus.

Then investigators tried something huge. They asked every unalibied male resident in nearby villages between ages 17 and 34 to voluntarily provide blood and saliva samples. They hoped the killer might be flushed out. Thousands of men were tested. But the real break did not come from the lab first. It came from a pub.

 On September 18th, 1987, police received a call from a woman who overheard a conversation at the Clarendon pub in Leicester. A man named Ian Kelly had been talking about how he took the blood test for a friend. That friend was Colin Pitchfork. Investigators looked closer. The signature from the day Pitchfork supposedly took the test did not match his earlier signature.

Ian Kelly worked with Pitchfork at a bakery. When police questioned Kelly, he eventually admitted that he had taken the test for Pitchfork. Pitchfork had convinced him to do it. That attempt to dodge DNA became the thing that exposed him. Police arrested Colin Pitchfork. He confessed to killing both Linda Mann and Dawn Ashworth.

He pleaded guilty in 1988 and received a double life sentence. The case became a landmark in criminal justice. It was the first time DNA profiling was used to clear an innocent suspect and then identify the guilty one. But the case did not end there in public memory. Pitchfork was later released on parole in 2021, then recalled to prison after breaching conditions.

 In 2025, his latest bid for release was rejected. The twist in this case is almost hard to believe. A man confessed and was innocent. A mass DNA test was launched. The killer tried to cheat the test. And the lie he told to avoid science became the road that led police straight back to him. Before we go any further, let that sink in for a second.

 Because the people in this story weren’t careless. They weren’t reckless. They were ordinary people on an ordinary night, and the danger walked right up to them wearing a face nobody questioned. That’s the part that stays with me. And it’s exactly why I put everything we’ve learned into one place, our ebook, built from the real patterns behind the cases we cover on this channel.

You see that QR code on your screen? Point your phone at it. You don’t have to read it right now. Just save it. Keep it in the back of your mind as the rest of this unfolds, because what happens next is the reason it exists. All right, back to that night. Because in Virginia, the story became even more disturbing.

This time, one man was already in prison, but the crimes kept happening. Debbie Dudley Davis was born in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1952. She later moved to Richmond and worked as an accounts manager at Style Weekly. She loved pop culture, Bruce Springsteen records, mystery novels, and even worked part-time at Waldenbooks.

On the evening of September 18th, 1987, Debbie and her co-worker Diana Hoff drove to Virginia Beach to see Dana Carvey perform. After the show, Diana dropped Debbie at her apartment on Devonshire Street in Richmond and waited until she was safely inside. That was the last time Diana saw her. The next morning, a man named Arnold Ellis noticed a car parked in front of his house. The engine was running.

The keys were still in the ignition. The driver was gone. The car belonged to Debbie Davis. She lived one street over. A police officer went to Debbie’s apartment. An elderly neighbor gave him a key. Inside, the officer found Debbie dead on her bed. Her hands had been bound. She had been assaulted and strangled.

 The person responsible had entered through a kitchen window after stealing a rocking chair from a nearby porch and using it to climb inside. Beside Debbie’s bed was a mystery novel she had been reading. The title was Presumed Innocent. The detail feels almost too strange, but it was real enough to stay in the case record.

 Investigators saw that the killer had left very little behind. No useful fingerprints, no witnesses, nothing obvious stolen. Then, only 2 weeks later, another woman was killed. Susan Elizabeth Helms had moved to Richmond for her residency in neurosurgery at the Medical College of Virginia. She was married to Marcel Slag and they lived in the Woodland Heights neighborhood.

On October 3rd, 1987, Marcel came home around 1:45 a.m. As he entered the house, he heard movement upstairs. He thought Susan had worked late and he might have woken her. He took a shower and quietly entered their dark bedroom. As his eyes adjusted, he saw his wife. Susan had been killed. She had been bound, assaulted, and strangled.

 A bedroom window was open. Their house was less than a mile from Debbie Davis’s house. Detective Ray Williams worked both cases. He believed the killer was still inside Susan’s house when Marcel arrived. The movement Marcel heard was not Susan. She was already dead. Outside the window, investigators found an open Vaseline jar left by the perpetrator.

 It was traced to a store near Cloverleaf Mall, but the lead did not solve the case. Then Williams noticed something in the financial records at the Walden Books where Debbie worked. Susan had written a check there, and Debbie had endorsed it on the back. It might have been a coincidence, or it might have been the thin thread connecting two victims.

Then came a third case. Diane Cho was 15. She and her family had immigrated from Korea to the United States in 1984. In 1987, she was a freshman at Manchester High School. She was smart, responsible, and helped her parents, who spoke little English. Before her death, Diane told friends about a recurring nightmare.

 In the dream, an unknown man followed her. She also told friends that she had seen the man from her dream at the mall. One night in November 1987, Diane went to the Cloverleaf Mall Theater with a friend to see The Princess Bride. She became frightened and pointed out a man staring at them from the parking lot. She said he was the stalker from her dreams.

On November 21st, Diane’s parents came home around 9:00 p.m. Her mother gave her a haircut. Around midnight, they could hear Diane typing an English paper in her room. The next day, her parents called home around 2:00 p.m. to remind the children about church. Diane’s younger brother answered.

 He said Diane was still asleep and he did not want to wake her. When her parents arrived home about an hour later, Diane’s mother opened her bedroom door and screamed. Diane had been killed in her room. She had been tied up, assaulted, and strangled. Her bedroom window was open. By then, the pattern was impossible to ignore. Richmond had a serial offender, but the story stretched beyond Richmond.

That same month, 44-year-old Sue Tucker was found dead in Arlington County, Virginia. She had been preparing to join her husband in Wales. Her neighbor noticed Sue’s bedroom window had been open for days and called police. Inside, investigators found Sue dead. She had been bound, assaulted, and strangled. The perpetrator had entered through a small basement laundry room window and even took time to eat part of an orange before leaving.

Arlington investigators noticed the similarity to a case from 1984, the killing of attorney Carolyn Ham. A man named David Vasquez had confessed to Carolyn Ham’s murder and was serving a 35-year sentence. But now, a similar crime had happened while Vasquez was in prison. Detective Joe Horgas went to speak with Vasquez.

 After the interview, he believed Vasquez was not responsible for Sue Tucker’s killing. Then investigators in Arlington and Richmond compared cases and realized the same kind of offender may have been active in both places. This forced police to look backward. In Arlington, between 1983 and 1984, a man had abducted and assaulted women.

 He entered homes and apartments through windows. He used cords from blinds to bind some victims. Then Carolyn Ham was killed in January 1984 and David Vasquez was arrested. The crimes stopped. That seemed to support the arrest. But after Sue Tucker’s death, investigators saw another possibility. What if the crimes had not stopped because the right man was caught? What if the real offender had been locked up for something else? The FBI believed a person with this pattern likely would not stop on his own. The pause suggested incarceration.

Detectives thought of Timothy Spencer. Spencer had a history of burglary. He had been arrested in January 1984 for break-ins in Alexandria. He had later been paroled to a halfway house in Richmond in 1987, shortly before Debbie Davis was killed. Investigators checked the halfway house records. Spencer had signed himself out on the evenings the Richmond crimes took place.

He also had a furlough to go to Arlington on the day Sue Tucker was killed. Police placed him under surveillance. They watched him violate parole by spending nights at his girlfriend’s house. They saw him spend hours at Cloverleaf Mall, a place linked to Debbie Davis, Susan Hellams, and Diane Cho. On January 20th, 1988, Arlington and Richmond detectives took Spencer into custody. They took a blood sample.

There were no fingerprints tying him to the crimes. No eyewitness identification strong enough to carry everything. The case depended on a new forensic method, DNA fingerprinting. At that point, DNA had been used in the United Kingdom in the Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth case, but it had not yet secured a murder conviction in the United States.

A private lab in New York tested the evidence. Spencer’s DNA matched biological evidence from the crime scenes of Debbie Davis, Susan Hellams, Sue Tucker, and assault victims in Arlington and Richmond. Timothy Spencer became known as the Southside Strangler. He was convicted in 1988. His case became the first murder conviction in the United States based on DNA evidence.

And David Vasquez? DNA later proved he was not responsible for Carolyn Ham’s killing. His confession had been false. According to the source material, investigators had revealed details to him and he repeated them back. He became known as the first person in the United States exonerated because of DNA. That is the horror inside this case.

A confession put one man in prison. The real killer kept living outside. And if the crimes had not continued, the system might have left the wrong man there. Timothy Spencer was executed in Virginia in 1994. The twist here is not only that DNA caught a serial offender, it is that DNA also exposed how badly a confession can mislead an investigation when the person confessing is vulnerable, pressured, or fed details.

The next case begins with a phone call that should have been routine. A husband working out of town tried to call home. His wife did not answer. So, he asked a neighbor to check. Katherine Louise Martin was known as Kathy. She married Mike Odum after a difficult start. Mike had been arrested for selling heroin before they married, served time, and later got out.

 Kathy was determined to build a life with him. They had two children, Tasha and Shawn, and lived in Harris County, Texas. Kathy’s father, Frankie Martin, gave Mike a job at his sign business. By all accounts in the source material, Kathy worked hard to keep her family together. She was described as a loving mother.

On March 3rd, 1987, Mike was out of town for work. He tried to call Kathy. She was supposed to be home with the children. She did not answer. Mike called their next door neighbor and asked him to check on her. The neighbor knocked. No answer. He looked through the window and saw the television still on.

 Instead of calling police, he drove into town, found a police officer, and brought him back to the house. The front door was unlocked. Inside, on the living room sofa, officers found 4-year-old Tasha. She had been badly beaten and was unconscious, but alive. 2-month-old Shawn was unharmed in his bedroom. In Kathy and Mike’s bedroom, officers found Kathy dead.

 She had been attacked, bound with the cord from a lamp, and killed. The scene was personal, violent, and frightening. Police feared the person responsible might return, so Tasha and Shawn were taken to the hospital, and officers ordered that they not be left alone. When Mike arrived, investigators watched him closely.

 One officer noticed red stains on his shirt that looked like blood. Police also found strange stains in the car of the neighbor, Tim Robinson. To investigators, the early theory seemed clear. Maybe Mike and Tim had arranged something. Maybe Mike wanted insurance money. Maybe the phone call asking someone else to check the house was part of a setup.

It was the kind of theory detectives had seen before. But then the evidence started breaking that theory apart. The medical examiner estimated Kathy died around 1:00 p.m. Mike and Tim both said they were at work then. Investigators checked their alibis. They held. The stains in Tim’s car were motor oil.

 The stains on Mike’s shirt were paint. Both men passed polygraph tests. And then Tasha woke from her coma. She was only 4 years old, and she had suffered a serious head injury. She could not give police a full story, but she remembered one thing. The man had yellow hair. Neither Mike nor Tim had blonde hair. That single fragment helped move the case away from them.

Police then turned towards someone else in Kathy’s family circle. Kathy had a sister named Shelly Martin. Shelly was married to Greg Marquart. Greg had met Shelly through Mike. Greg and Mike had both been connected to drugs in the past. Shelly and Greg had struggled badly and were in and out of jail.

 They had stolen from Shelly’s parents. Greg was not a distant stranger. He was family. Shortly before Kathy was killed, she reportedly told a friend that Greg had made advances toward her while Shelly was in another room with the baby. Kathy rejected him. When police questioned Greg, he claimed he had been with a man named Hampton Robinson III during the times he was not with Shelly.

But investigators found evidence Greg had been inside Kathy’s house before. His fingerprints and hair were there. Since he was family, that did not prove he killed her. Kathy’s parents believed Greg was responsible. Frankie Martin said that 2 days after Kathy was killed, he got a phone call in the middle of the night from the hospital where Tasha was being treated.

Shelly and Greg had come to visit. Frankie told the hospital not to let them in. Kathy’s mother, Charlene, later recalled that when Tasha saw Greg, she became scared and he was ordered to leave. Police asked Tasha if Uncle Greg was the man she saw in the house that day. She could not remember enough to say. That is one of the cruel parts of this case.

A child survived, but the injury took away the clarity investigators needed. Greg denied involvement, but he said disturbing things about his attraction to Kathy. During one interview, he asked to leave so he could put money in a parking meter. He never came back. He also refused a polygraph. Investigators checked his alibi.

Shelly said Greg drove her to school at 10:30 that morning and picked her up at 2:30 in the afternoon. That left a 4-hour window. The medical examiner’s estimate placed Cathy’s death around 1:00 p.m. At the time, investigators had serology, not modern DNA testing. The evidence collected from Cathy was consistent with Greg’s blood type type O.

 But about half the population also shared that blood type. It was not enough. The case went cold. In 1998, a cold case team took another look. DNA testing had improved. A DNA profile from Cathy’s case showed Greg Marquart was part of the 2% of the general population who could have been the attacker. Better than 50%. Still not enough. Greg offered an explanation.

 He claimed he and Cathy had been having a consensual affair and that he was with her the morning she died. He insisted she was alive when he left. Investigators did not believe him, but they still needed stronger proof. They had to show he was present during the crime itself. Then a private forensic lab in Dallas tried an unusual approach.

 A scientist named Katherine Long and her colleagues wanted to know if a person who strangled someone would leave skin cells behind. To test this, they used controlled contact to determine whether skin cells transferred during that kind of physical struggle. They found that they did. Investigators needed an item from Cathy’s evidence file that the killer would have handled.

They focused on the electrical cord used to bind Cathy’s hands. Then came a piece of luck that was not luck at all, but proper evidence storage. The cord had been stored in a paper bag, not plastic. Paper breathes. It keeps moisture from building up. It helps preserve DNA longer. The cord was tested.

 Two genetic profiles were found. Kathy’s and Greg Marquart’s. That was the proof investigators needed. Greg was arrested on December 18th, 2002. While in prison, he reportedly confessed to another inmate. He said he had gone to Kathy’s house while high, made advances, and when she rejected him, attacked Tasha to force Kathy to comply.

He then assaulted and killed Kathy, cleaned up, and changed into Mike Odum’s clothing. In 2004, Greg Marquart pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 45 years in prison. He died of liver disease in 2008 after serving 4 years. The twist here is not only that the killer was family. The twist is that a child survived, but could only give one detail.

Yellow hair. The twist is that a cord stored in the right kind of bag became the witness that Tasha could not be. And the twist is that for years, the evidence had not disappeared. It was waiting. The next case begins in LaPorte, Indiana with a teenage girl who loved animals. Raina Risen was born in 1976. She lived with her parents, Ben and Karen, and had two sisters, Lori and Wendy.

In 1993, Raina was 16. She was a sophomore at LaPorte High School and wanted to become a veterinarian. She worked at an animal hospital, walking dogs and cleaning kennels. On Friday, March 26th, 1993, Raina had a short shift at the animal hospital from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. After work, she planned to spend the evening with her ex-boyfriend, Matt Elser.

 They had broken up, but were considering getting back together. The date mattered to both of them. Matt arrived at the animal hospital at 6:00 p.m. to pick Raina up. He waited. She did not come out. He went to the front door. The lights were off. The door was closed. Raina’s car was not in the parking lot. Matt drove to her house. Raina’s father told him she had not come home.

 Her family assumed she was with Matt. Now they knew something was wrong. By 10:30 p.m., Raina still had not returned. Her family went to police. They gave officers her photo and started searching. They contacted people she knew. They handed out flyers. Then witnesses came forward. They said that just before 6:00 p.m., they saw a sedan outside the animal hospital.

 Two men were in the car with Raina. It looked like Raina was arguing with them. The witnesses did not intervene because they thought it was a couple’s argument. That detail lands differently later. Because the face of danger did not look like a stranger grabbing someone from the shadows. It looked like a conversation. Matt was questioned. His story held.

 Raina’s parents defended him as a good young man. His car was not the car witnesses saw. The next night, Raina’s car was found near the animal hospital. The hood was raised as if she had car trouble. But officers started the car easily with her keys, which were still in the ignition. Her purse, credit cards, and money were inside.

It looked staged. Then police found a man’s ring in Raina’s glove compartment. Matt said it was not his. He identified it as belonging to Jason Tibbs, another ex-boyfriend. Jason was 16. He and Raina had dated in seventh grade and broken up after around eight months. He had dropped out of school and had a criminal history.

Police questioned him. Jason admitted the ring was his. He said he had worked on Raina’s car and must have left it in the glove compartment after taking it off to keep it clean. Locals said Jason was a good mechanic, so the explanation sounded possible. Reina’s father confirmed she and Jason were still friends.

Jason also gave an alibi. He said he had been playing a game called fox hunting, a kind of hide-and-seek played in cars with wireless radios. His friends confirmed they had been playing, but no one had actually seen Jason. Then police found Matt’s letterman jacket. Reina had last been seen with it. Matt had given it to her to wear and it symbolized that they were together.

 A sheriff’s deputy found it six or seven miles from where Reina’s car had been found. The jacket had been placed there after police had already searched the area. But it gave them no answer. On April 26th, 1993, a month after Reina disappeared, a fisherman and his teenage daughter were near a pond off Range Road north of LaPorte.

The daughter saw what looked like human legs in the water. Her father got closer and realized it was a body. Two logs had been placed over her. Police identified the body as Reina. Due to decomposition, investigators could not learn everything they wanted, but the autopsy concluded she had been strangled. The case shifted from missing person to homicide.

Police looked back at Jason Tibbs. Jason then told them about Ray McCarty. Ray was married to Reina’s older sister, Lori. He had assaulted and impregnated Reina when she was 11 and had been imprisoned for it. His probation had ended only 2 months before Reina disappeared. That made him a serious suspect. Police went to Ray and Lori’s house.

 At first, they said neither had seen Reina the day she vanished. Ray said he had been shooting pigeons at a friend’s farm that night. The friend confirmed it. But something felt wrong. Police talked to Ray again. This time, he changed his story. He said he had seen Raina the night she disappeared.

 He claimed he had been house hunting near the animal hospital around 5:40 p.m. and saw Raina in the parking lot. He said he asked if she knew where Lori was, then left. He said he had lied because he picked up a female hitchhiker that night and did not want Lori to know. Ray became the main suspect. But, police had no physical evidence tying him to Raina’s death.

Then the case took another turn. About 18 months later, Indiana State Police pulled over a van driven by Larry Hall. Hall traveled across the Midwest for Civil War and Revolutionary War reenactments. His van resembled one used in an attempted kidnapping. Inside, police found newspaper clippings about Raina and a prescription bottle with the name Rison on it.

 Hall claimed he had abducted and killed Raina. For a moment, it looked like the case had broken. But, detectives checked his movements and found he had been in Kentucky on the night Raina disappeared. The prescription bottle was fake. Hall had falsely confessed to many crimes. He was ruled out in Raina’s case. The investigation returned to the same suspects.

Matt’s alibi was strong. Jason’s alibi was weak, but not broken. Ray had lied and his past with Raina made him dangerous. So, investigators focused on him. In 1998, they searched Ray’s property. They found guns and a stun gun. They found blood in his car trunk. He was arrested and spent 15 months in jail while prosecutors built the case.

Then the blood was determined to belong to a deer. A new prosecutor decided there was not enough evidence. Ray was released. Raina’s case went cold again. Then, in 2008, police received a letter from an inmate named Ricky Hammonds. He was serving a 44-year sentence for killing his roommate.

 He said he wanted to talk about Raina. Ricky said that in 1993, when he was 14, he had been in the loft of a barn near his parents’ house smoking marijuana. He heard a car drive into the barn. He looked down and saw his sister’s boyfriend, Eric Freeman, with Jason Tibbs. They opened the trunk. Inside, Ricky saw a body covered by a blanket. He could see the upper half.

 It was a female wearing a letterman jacket. A few days later, when Raina’s face appeared in the media, Ricky realized who he had seen. He said he did not come forward because he was young, scared, and afraid he would get in trouble for smoking marijuana. Police tracked Eric Freeman to South Carolina.

 At first, he was nervous and refused to talk. Investigators told him he would face no consequences if he told them what happened. Eric accepted the deal. He said he and Jason had been driving in his girlfriend’s sedan on March 26th, 1993, when they passed the animal hospital. Jason wanted Raina to leave Matt and take him back.

 When Raina came out, Jason called her over. She did not want to talk. Before she could scream, he pushed her into the car and told Eric to drive. A short time later, Eric stopped the car. Raina tried to run. Jason followed her. According to Eric, Jason said, “If I can’t have you, no one can.” Then he strangled her. Eric said they put Raina in the trunk and drove to the barn where Ricky saw them.

 Later, they placed her body in the pond and weighted down. Eric drove Jason back to pick up Raina’s car, and Jason abandoned it. He also discarded Matt’s jacket. In August 2013, Jason Tibbs was arrested. His trial started later that year. The defense attacked Ricky’s credibility because he had waited 15 years and was young at the time. Eric Freeman received immunity to testify.

In December 2014, Jason Tibbs was found guilty and sentenced to 40 years with 20 years served outside prison. Reina’s family finally had a conviction, but the twist still hurts. Witnesses saw her arguing near a sedan and thought it was nothing. Police found Jason’s ring and accepted an explanation. Another man looked more dangerous because his past with Reina was so terrible.

A known false confessor entered the case and wasted time. And the person who had seen the body in a trunk stayed silent for 15 years. Sometimes cold cases go cold because there is no evidence. Reina’s case went cold because the truth was spread across too many people and the one witness who had seen the most was too afraid to speak.