She Texted Her Boyfriend At 4AM. That Was The Last Anyone Heard From Her

Just imagine for a second you fall asleep on a friend’s couch after a night out, but right next to you there’s a glass door and on the other side of it someone can see you. They’re watching you sleep and then that person opens the door, walks into the house, and takes you [music] from right there on the couch.

 That’s what happened to 19-year-old Brianna Dennison. She’s asleep in her pajamas using a teddy bear as a pillow and somehow no one else in the house hears it. That’s where this story starts. I’m Amy, let’s recap. >> [music] >> So now it’s the next morning around 9:00 a.m. Sunday, January 20th, 2008. A cold morning in Reno and inside the house everything feels normal at first.

 Two of the girls wake up after a night out. They’re thinking about breakfast. They’re just starting their day. So they head into the kitchen and that’s when they notice, “Hey, Brianna’s not on the couch.” Which at first isn’t that weird. They figure she probably just went upstairs, maybe crashed in one of the empty bedrooms.

 So they go up, they knock on the door, they call out. They’re like, “Hey girl, you know, wake up. Breakfast ready.” But nothing. So what would you think at that moment? She’s asleep. She’s sleeping hard. I mean, they got back late and all. So they go away, but maybe 30 minutes go by, give or take, and Brianna is still not up.

 So they go back upstairs and they knock again. Still nothing. So they open the door and the room is empty. So where is she? Because her stuff is still downstairs. Her shoes, her purse, her phone, her clothes, they’re all still in the living room. She was only wearing a pair of sweats and a tank top. So where would she go? And then they notice the pillow she was using.

 There’s something on it and it looks like blood. And at that point they know something is really wrong. So the first call they make is to Brianna’s mom and the second is to the police. So to understand how this even happens, you have to go back to the night before. It’s a Saturday, January 19th, 2008, early evening in Reno, Nevada, and Brianna’s just getting ready for a night out.

 She and one of her friends head over to another friend’s house near the University of Nevada, the Reno campus, and they get there around 7:00, maybe 8:00, and it’s exactly what you’d expect. One of those college houses where people are always coming and going, music playing, girls getting ready together, that kind of vibe.

 And for Brianna, this night matters cuz she actually goes to school in California, Santa Barbara City College, but she’s home in Reno for winter break. So, this is her chance to be back with her high school friends. Just hanging out, going out, having a great night. So, they start out at the Sands Hotel, and then they hop on a bus with a bunch of other students, and they head over to a concert. Crowds, music, a lot going on.

After the concert, they head back to the Sands. There’s a lot of college students in town for this event, so people are having parties in their hotel rooms. You know how it is. At some point, one of the girls decides to call it a night early. She has work in the morning, so she heads back to the house to sleep.

But Brianna and her other friend, they keep it going a little longer. They end up at Mel’s Diner. They’re ordering mozzarella sticks, milkshakes, just sitting there, talking, winding down. Sounds like an amazing time. And then, around 3:30 in the morning, they get a ride back to the house. They walk in through the front door, which according to friends is usually unlocked, and they start getting ready for bed.

 And that’s how the night ends. Now, by the time they get back, the house is already quiet. That friend who left earlier, she’s asleep in a bedroom on the first floor, right next to the living room. So, Brianna and her friend come in, keeping it quiet. They change into their pajamas. They’re trying not to wake this girl up.

 Brianna’s friend slips into bed with this girl because she’s the one who lives there. This is her house. The friend that’s already asleep, she’s visiting. Brianna decides to just take the couch. So, they set her up out there. Couple blankets, a pillow, and a teddy bear to use as an extra pillow. And then her friend heads into her room, takes her little Chihuahua with her, and goes to sleep.

 Now, the last time she sees Brianna, she’s on that couch. She’s texting her boyfriend who’s in Oregon. Uh police say the last message comes in at 4:23 a.m. And then, about 5 hours later, when the girls wake up and come back into the living room, Brianna’s gone. So, when police get there, their attention goes straight to the couch.

More specifically, the pillow Brianna had been using. Investigators find three separate blood stains on it. They’re not huge, but they’re enough to stand out. And when they take a closer look, they determine it’s Brianna’s blood mixed with saliva and mucus and smears of her mascara.

 And then there’s something else. Marks on the pillow that look like bite marks, which leads investigators to believe it was used to muffle her screams or hold her down. And what’s strange is there aren’t a lot of signs of a struggle anywhere else in the house. No furniture knocked over, nothing obvious like that, except for one thing.

 One of the blankets Brianna had been using is found on the floor in the kitchen. And it’s not just randomly there. It seems to be along a path from the couch to the back door, like it got dropped as she was taken through the house. And the teddy bear she’d been using as a pillow, that’s gone. And then they check for DNA.

 And this is where the case takes a turn. So, on the back door, investigators find a male DNA profile. And at first it’s just that, unknown. But when they run it, it matches something else. Actually, multiple things. That same DNA has already been found in three other sexual assaults, all near the University of Nevada campus.

 So, in November and December, two female students were attacked in the early morning hours on campus. Both say they’re grabbed from behind. One of them is choked unconscious. And when she wakes up, she’s in a truck being assaulted. Now, afterwards, she says the man drives her home, tells her to get out, not to look at him, and not to call police.

 Yeah, right, buddy. And then going back even further, in October, another woman is attacked at gunpoint in a garage where campus police park their cruisers. So, now investigators are looking at this and realizing, “Hey, these aren’t isolated cases.” And there’s another detail that stands out. Two of the victims say the man took their underwear, which starts to paint a very specific picture of who they’re dealing with.

 And one of the victims is actually able to give a really detailed description of the guy. And when you think about how she knows all this, it’s honestly chilling. She describes him as a white man somewhere between his late 20s and 40, brown hair, some facial hair, not rough stubble, more like it’s grown out a bit. He’s taller than average, strong, but not overly muscular, no accent, no smell of alcohol, no cologne, just normal, which somehow makes it even worse.

 She even remembers what he’s wearing, a red short-sleeve shirt, kind of like that jersey material, layers underneath, loose athletic-style pants. And then there’s the car. She describes it as some kind of pickup or an SUV with a step to get in, cloth seats, a sound system with blue and red lights, and there is a baby shoe on the floor, and papers scattered around.

 All of it just burned into her memory. And at this point, this is the only real picture investigators have of who they’re looking for. So, now they have a description, they have DNA, but it’s not getting them anywhere. There’s no match in the system, no arrests, and Brianna is still missing. Then, about 3 and 1/2 weeks later, everything changes again.

It’s February 15, 2008, late morning. One of those slightly warmer winter days in Reno. So, a man decides to walk over to a sandwich shop to grab lunch on his break from work. On his way back, he cuts across a vacant lot near his building. And at first, you know, nothing seems out of place, but then he notices something.

 It’s a Christmas tree. It’s just lying there, which is odd, but it’s not alarming. But then he sees something else, bright-colored socks. So, he steps closer thinking maybe it’s a mannequin or something that got dumped out there, but it’s like this bright color, so it really catches his his attention. But then he gets close enough and he realizes they’re attached to a body.

Now, he doesn’t have his phone on him, so he runs back to his office, tells his manager what he just saw. The two of them go back to the lot, and that’s when his manager calls 911. It’s Brianna Dennison. She’s only wearing those bright orange socks. But when police process the scene, they find something else, something that doesn’t belong there.

 Underneath her leg, there are two pairs of thong underwear. One is pink lace, and the other is black with the Pink Panther on them. And at first, it’s just strange. Like, why would that be here? But then investigators test them, and that’s when it gets even more disturbing. The black pair has DNA from the attacker and from another still unidentified female.

 But the pink pair, that one has the attacker’s DNA, Brianna’s DNA, and her friend’s. Which means at some point, he’d gone into the house, into her friend’s room, and taken them. Did it happen the night of the attack, during the attack, before the attack, before he took her, you know? They’re not They’re not sure. But prosecutors do say those underwear were then used to strangle Brianna.

 But at this point, police are still asking the same question. Who is this guy? Because they’ve got pieces of him, just not a name. So, they’re able to figure out that he’s likely local to the Reno area based on everything they’ve seen across these cases, they believe he has a very specific pattern, very specific fetish for thong underwear.

 Prosecutors say he finds his victims on or near the university campus, so he’s very familiar with that area, like the housing that he took Brianna from. He takes his victim’s underwear and he keeps them, almost like trophies. And in Brianna’s case, they believe that he leaves them behind on purpose, almost like a message to the police.

 But even with all of that, plus the description, they still don’t know who it is they’re looking for. And then, nearly 10 months later, there’s a break. An anonymous call comes into the secret witness tip line. And just like that, the case finally starts to move. And that tip leads police to a name, James Michael Biela.

 He’s 27 years old, a construction worker, former Marine. He’s been living in Reno for years, but right after Brianna’s body is found, he leaves. He takes a job out of state, up in Washington, near where his mom lives, where he went to high school. And when people start talking about him, you get a really mixed picture.

 Some say he’s the kind of guy who just blends in. He’s funny, he’s social, the type you’d see at a bar or party and not think twice about. He’s even been training at a local martial arts gym, right alongside police officers who were looking for him. Now, at the same time, others describe something very different, a guy with a quick temper, aggressive, someone who’d already had problems before.

 There are reports he was discharged from the Marines over drug use. A former girlfriend had a restraining order against him after she said he threatened someone with a knife. And police say his relationship with his current girlfriend, the mother of his young son is volatile. So now investigators aren’t just looking for a suspect.

 They’ve got a person. But here’s how he actually ends up on police radar. In September 2008, he’s driving back to Reno from Washington with his girlfriend and their young son. Just, you know, normal trip. And at some point she goes into the glove compartment of his truck and she finds something. Two pairs of women’s thong underwear, which he immediately feels off.

 So she asks him about it and he comes up with some explanation, says it must have been a mix-up at a laundromat, something like that. But it doesn’t really sit right. So when they get back to Reno, she mentions it to a friend. And that friend has been following Breonna’s case closely because at this point everyone in Reno knows about it and she remembers something specific.

 Police had recently asked the public for help identifying that pair of black underwear with the Pink Panther on them, hoping that whoever they belonged to might come forward. You know, because maybe they would know, oh, I gave that to my boyfriend or that’s, you know, this ex of mine, something. They’d also released a description of the suspect and the kind of vehicle that he was driving.

 So now this girl is putting this together, the underwear, the description, the truck, and she starts thinking, this might not be nothing. This whole underwear in the glove compartment thing, this might be something that police need to look at. So detectives don’t waste any time. They follow up on that tip and they bring James in.

 And right away, he denies everything. He refuses to give a DNA sample and he gives them an alibi. Says he was with his girlfriend the whole night Breonna was taken. But when investigators go to her, she says, “Well, that’s not true. He wasn’t with me.” So now that story falls apart. And with her permission, detectives take a DNA sample from their young son.

 They run it through the lab and the results come back. The child’s father is almost certainly a match for the DNA found at the crime scene. At that point it’s just a matter of confirming it. James is arrested. He’s ordered to provide his own DNA, and after an overnight test at the lab, it’s official. It’s a match.

And that’s when charges are filed. So, police end up calling this a crime of opportunity. Because of where Breonna was sleeping, right by that glass door, from outside you would have been able to see her. And you know, he’s already active in that area. So, investigators believe he may have been moving around the house, checking doors, looking for a way in.

 And while they think he comes in through the front, his DNA is found on the back heavily, which leads them to believe that’s how he left. They believe that as is his MO from the earlier assaults, he choked her unconscious on the couch, carried her out of the house out the back. Ultimately, this is the picture prosecutors put together for the jury.

 So, after he takes her out of the house, he drives her somewhere else, so they believe she’s assaulted and killed, strangled with that her friend’s underwear. And then her body is left in that vacant lot. And then there’s this detail, which is just so hard to wrap your head around. His girlfriend, the mother of his child, she actually works right near that field.

 So, when Breonna’s body is found, she can see the police out there, the tape, the investigation, all of it. So, she’s following the case closely, like everyone else, watching it unfold, not realizing the person responsible is someone she knows. And later she tells investigators, he seemed completely indifferent to it.

 At one point even saying that the only reason people even cared about Breonna was because she was hot, and she was her family was rich. And when her body was found, he allegedly said, “That B word probably had it coming.” In the end, it doesn’t take long for a jury to decide, just 6 hours. That’s all it takes to find him guilty.

 Prosecutors push for the death penalty, but his defense team fights it. They argue he had a violent childhood. He grew up in a home where his father abused his mother. One of his lawyers says he witnessed things that no child should ever have to see. But in the end, it doesn’t change their minds. He’s sentenced to death along with four additional life sentences for the rapes of the other girls.

 And today, he’s still sitting on death row. Now, Brianna’s story doesn’t just end with the conviction though, cuz her family takes that loss and they turn it into something. They push for a new law in Nevada, and it’s known as Brianna’s Law. And what it does is pretty simple, and it’s kind of shocking that this wasn’t already a law.

 Police It allows police to take DNA at the time of a felony arrest. Same way you take fingerprints or a mugshot. Because before this, DNA wasn’t collected until someone was actually convicted, which could take months, even years, if it happened at all. And when you look at this case, that timing matters because James Biela had been arrested on a felony years earlier.

 So, if this law had been in place back then, his DNA would have been in the system. And when those earlier assaults happened in 2007, there’s a chance he would have been identified sooner, which means Brianna might never have been targeted. That law was signed into effect in 2013, and within just a few years, it had already helped connect DNA to over a thousand cases.

 So, you have to wonder how many other crimes were stopped because of it. And then there’s one more detail that’s absolutely chilling. Almost exactly 10 years after Brianna is killed, another member of her family disappears. Her cousin, Kaitlin Dennison, 19 years old. She goes missing in Texas, and her case is still unsolved.