The Smiley Face Killer - Documentary

The Smiley Face Killer - Documentary

Speaker 1: Meet John Doe, a quiet, friendly type who likes to

keep his yard trimmed and tidy. He's a perfect neighbor

in every way but one. John Doe kills women, a

lot of women.

Speaker 2: The bodies are piling up. People began wondering what's going

on here? Who are these women? Who's killing him?

Speaker 1: Seventeen women dead and police can't find him. He's a

serial killer with the ultimate weapon. He's a chameleon.

Speaker 3: Serial killers trademark is their ability to manipulate those around

them into believing that they are nothing more than just

a regular human man.

Speaker 4: It was like a puzzle, and I wanted to solve it.

Speaker 1: A dark, twisted puzzle spawned from the mind of a

killer that only forensic science can stop. Spokane, Washington. By day,

it's a safe place to raise a family, but when

night falls, a darker underbelly emerges. In the past three years,

six women have been found dead, shot and dumped in

the countryside. Their bodies are so decomposed at least find

little evidence, and identifying them takes months. When investigators finally

do put names to the victims, they discover they have

one thing in common. They are ladies of the night.

Speaker 3: There is extremely unusual half dead prostitutes in the city

of Spokane.

Speaker 5: Within a short period of time, we had some type

of a serial murder situation going on here.

Speaker 3: There was somebody preying on that segment of our society

here in Spokane.

Speaker 1: Then the streets grow quiet and investigators pray the killing

is over. August twenty sixth, nineteen ninety seven, a rider

on the outskirts of Spokane sees what he thinks is

a dead deer that is no animal. Detectives Rick Gravenstein

and Fred Rooch respond to the crime scene. Is this

woman the latest victim of the serial killer? The location

of the body strikes a chord with investigators.

Speaker 5: It was in a rural area, wheat fields and trees.

Speaker 1: Gravenstein and Rooch know this countryside well.

Speaker 3: Every single body that was found in this county. Regardless

of the reason we responded to it.

Speaker 1: Previous crime scenes have yielded little evidence. This victim's wounds

are fresh, potentially offering clues about the killer. A small

hole in the skull points to the cause of death.

Speaker 3: A hole in the back there She had apparently been

the victim of a gunshot wound that they had shot

with a small caliber handgun.

Speaker 1: But if they're right, the crime scene doesn't match the crime.

Speaker 3: Every time you have a head wound, you have a

great deal of bleeding, particularly with the gunshot wounds.

Speaker 5: That blood should be there at the scene.

Speaker 6: When there's a lack of blood and an immediate location,

that generally indicates that the killing did not occure there.

And this is what's commonly referred to as a dump site.

Speaker 3: Every one of the victims had been transported by a

motor vehicle to their body found sites. We know we

have a car somewhere. More than likely it has a

great deal of evidence in it.

Speaker 1: And the method of support isn't the only similarity to

the previous crimes.

Speaker 6: The fact that they were in the rural areas, all female,

in different conditions of disrobing, and the fact that they

all having been shot it did lead you to at

least suspect strongly that there was some relationship there.

Speaker 1: If the serial killer is back, investigators need hard evidence

to confirm their suspicion, but first they have to id

the victim. Through dental records, they learn her name is

Jennifer Joseph, a local prostitute. At the autopsy, the coroner

looks for the serial killer's signature mo O.

Speaker 7: There were generally at least two gun shot wounds to

the head region very closely situated, and this is sometimes

referred to in police military circles as double tapping. In

other words, the habit of firing. If you're going to

fire the gun firate twice.

Speaker 1: But Jennifer Joseph's body tells a different story.

Speaker 7: In this particular autopsy, there were some distinctly different findings.

She had gunshop wounds elsewhere that included the left shoulder,

and there was also a gunshop wound to the chest region,

the anterior chest region. This strongly suggested this lady either

resisted or it may have potentially almost got away.

Speaker 1: Bullet fragments indicate the killer used a twenty two pistol,

a discovery which gives them pause for thought. Investigators know

the previous victims were shot with the larger twenty five

caliber weapon. Now they must ask themselves is the killer

changing his m or worse, could this be the work

of a copycat killer. To link Jennifer's murder to the others,

they'll need more than circumstantial evidence. The coroner searches her

body for traces of the killer's DNA.

Speaker 7: What we're looking for primarily is seminal fluid that gives

us the opportunity if we can recover it for DNA

identification of a perpetrator or at least somebody who's had

intercourse in a brief interval prior to the death.

Speaker 1: In previous cases, the massive deterioration of the bodies made

DNA retrieval almost impossible.

Speaker 7: In many cases, putrefaction was so bad that you weren't

even sure that you could tell where you were sampling.

Speaker 1: Despite these challenges, the coroner has managed to get two

matching DNA samples from previous victims. Now he searches for

male DNA in Jennifer Joseph's body. True to form, the

coroner gets his sample and with it the answer investigators

have been waiting for.

Speaker 6: It became very apparent us that this was the DNA

of our killer.

Speaker 1: Despite the different used in the Jennifer Joseph killing, the

DNA evidence leads no doubt that after a year of silence,

the serial killer is back on the prow. If investigators

want to catch their killer, they have to head down

to his watering hole and in Spokane. That means East

Sprague Avenue, better known as the Track. They spread a

wide net attempting to identify regular customers.

Speaker 3: We briefed the uniform division to try to make as

much note as possible of everybody that was utilizing the

prostitutes out there.

Speaker 5: It's white, not.

Speaker 1: But winning the confidence of these women presents police with

a challenge.

Speaker 3: The relationship between police and prostitutes is typically real adversarial.

Speaker 5: We're on opposite sides of the law.

Speaker 1: The prostitute stonewall the police at every turn.

Speaker 6: They're reluctant to reporting of this to the police, and

because they don't trust the police.

Speaker 1: The killer chooses his victims wisely. He stalks the track,

knowing full well that a missing prostitute attracts little police attention.

Speaker 3: There were people at higher levels controlling purse strings, that

sort of thing. That did make some off the cuff

comments about spending that much time investigating the death of

a prostitute, But.

Speaker 1: The attitudes of local citizens presents an even greater obstacle.

Speaker 2: Because only prostitutes were showing up dead, there was really,

unfortunately not a lot of attention paid to this, and

this community woke up very slowly to what was going on.

That these had been school teachers, Are nurses ending up

dead and tossed into these fields and along the roadsides,

Something would have been done much quicker.

Speaker 3: You know, the public's perception of the victims out there,

that's a very little concern to me.

Speaker 5: As a detective. I'ming a guy at the bottom.

Speaker 3: My job is to catch who's killing him.

Speaker 1: That job's about to get a whole lot harder. In

a high stakes game of cat and mouse. The killer

continues to elude police over the next few months, right

under their noses. He strikes again and again and again.

Speaker 5: This guy is not going to quit killing people.

Speaker 1: With every murder, the Spokane serial killer is cleaning up

his act. In Spokane, Washington, investigators are chasing an elusive

serial killer. They have his DNA, but no viable suspect

match it with and with his latest victim, he's getting

better at covering his tracks.

Speaker 6: I noticed that placed over her head was a plastic

shopping bag with a smiley face imprinted on it, and

at that time myself and the other detective's present discussed

whether this was some kind of a.

Speaker 8: Sick joke. For lack of a better term.

Speaker 1: The latest victim is twenty six year old Darlas SIUs Scott.

Investigators question the purpose of the plastic bag.

Speaker 7: These are obviously not playing any role in the death,

and the reason for that is there are no holes

in the bags and there are gunshob wounds that the

head underneath the bag. The only explanation that seems reasonable

for this is a person who's probably transporting the body

and needs to stop the shedding of blood from the wounds.

Speaker 1: With this new trick under his belt, the killer won't

be leave any more evidence behind in his car. He's

cleaning up his act.

Speaker 7: If I can use the term learning in a perverse sense,

that that's what's going on. He's learning from each of

his victims as he moves along through the course.

Speaker 5: Of these murders.

Speaker 1: With the death toll rising. Women working the streets like

Christine Smith know that every trick is a high stake.

Speaker 9: Scambal, are you doing, honey, It's like playing Russian roulette. Really,

everybody was in fear. I mean it wasn't just I

don't think it was just the prostitutes. I mean everyone

was concerned.

Speaker 1: Although the track is a hunting ground, many prostitutes stay

for one simple reason, drugs.

Speaker 9: Every penny I made went to crack, every single penny.

I would work twenty four hours a day, seven days

a week. Go go go, go, go, go go, and

it was it was just to buy.

Speaker 1: Crack in the women that work the track. The killer

knows he's got a desperate and captive supply of victims

for Christine Smith and the others, Leaving town isn't an option.

Speaker 9: I mean, you got to feed the gorilla on your

back no matter what.

Speaker 1: Pressuring the prostitutes for information isn't working, So investigators adopt

a news strategy. They send in officers with special instructions

build trust with the women.

Speaker 3: We had detectives assigned just for that purpose, whose marching

orders were basically to overlook any of the misdemeanor or.

Speaker 5: Low level criminal activity they may be involved in.

Speaker 3: Befriend them, become their friend, become their trusted somebody so

that they'll call you.

Speaker 1: Through sheer persistence, they finally succeed in getting one of

the women to open up. She reveals a key piece

of information about the night Jennifer Joseph disappeared. Last time

I saw her, she was getting into a white Corvette

a white Corvette. Did she get a plate?

Speaker 5: Is he a regular?

Speaker 4: No?

Speaker 6: We had a good identification that Jennifer Joseph had been

seen in a white Corvette the last time that we

could verify that she was seen alive.

Speaker 1: It's the first big break in the case. But locating

the car is not as easy as it might seem.

Speaker 3: We had about four thousand corvette registrations from eastern Washington

and another nine hundred from northern Idaho.

Speaker 1: Investigators are also concerned that the car's color might have

been misreported.

Speaker 3: Some people's idea of what white is is another person's

silver or another person's light blue.

Speaker 5: So you're worried about excluding cars.

Speaker 3: It might be the killer's car. So the list of

several thousand corvettes long.

Speaker 1: Right.

Speaker 10: I got the pictures the vets.

Speaker 1: In an effort to focus the list, they re examine

their evidence looking for any connection to the car. Forensic

technician Kevin Jenkins recovers a red fiber from Jennifer Joseph schu.

Speaker 10: The characteristics that I look at to determine if something

is a carpet fiber is generally the size. Carpet fibers

are generally larger than those used for clothing or upholstery.

Speaker 1: Based on the lifestyle of the victim, he concludes that

those fibers are not from just any carpet.

Speaker 10: The fibers were likely from a automotive source just by the

nature of the victims being prostitutes and in and out

of cars on a regular basis.

Speaker 1: Now investigators have a specific tool to pare down the

forty nine hundred corvettes on their list. They meet with

corvette owners. They check all used car lots and corvette clubs,

collecting carpet samples from every corvette they find with a

red interior.

Speaker 10: Carpet samples from several vehicles were sent to the laboratory

for analysis to compare against the carpet fibers that were

found on Jennifer Joseph.

Speaker 1: But there is no match. Checking almost five thousand vehicles

is going to take time, time the killer can use

to hunt his next victim. Investigators finally know the make

of the Spokane serial killer's car and even the color

of its carpet, but they are no closer to determining

his identity. They turn to the one piece of evidence

they have that might bear the mark of their killer.

Speaker 7: We were hoping to potentially get a print off of

those bags.

Speaker 5: If at all.

Speaker 1: Possible, investigators turned to a radical new approach in fingerprint technology.

Speaker 3: I first became aware of it one night at home

watching a television show about forensic work.

Speaker 1: The new cutting edge technology is called vacuum metal deposition.

It's the last chance they have to get the killer's fingerprints.

Speaker 6: This machine is a large metal tank from which they

extract all the air and turn it into virtually a

perfect vacuum.

Speaker 1: The device works by heating zinc and gold within the

tank until they vaporize. The metals coat everything except contaminants.

Speaker 6: The fingerprints show up because that is a contaminant, and

any contaminant disrupts the deposition of the metal onto the article.

Speaker 1: Having now retrieved four smiley face bags from the killer's

latest victims, police are confident they'll find something, but the

first bag reveals nothing. Disappointed, they return to the drawing board.

Three bags from three victims are painstakingly run through the system,

but still no sign of their killer. On their last try,

they finally catch a break and manage to pull a print.

It's not the fingerprint they'd been hoping for. It's a

pomp print and that poses problems for investigators.

Speaker 6: The palm print has to be compared one to one

with a suspect palm print by a human examiner.

Speaker 1: The trouble is investigators are a long way from finding

a suspect.

Speaker 8: I liken the whole investigation to a roller coaster.

Speaker 6: We would be up one moment believing that we were

on the trail of our killer, only to find that

the lab would prove us wrong.

Speaker 1: With every blind alley they go down, the killer gets

another chance to strike, and two weeks after his last murder,

he decides to double his efforts. The latest victims are

Laura Wasson and Sean mcclenahan. Again, it's the same mo.

The victims are prostitutes found in an isolated rural setting.

Both have been shot in the head. Both are tagged

with the killer's infamous calling card, But this time one

of the bodies yields a clue, a strange mark behind

her lefty ear.

Speaker 7: When a contact gunshot wound occurs, there's a good chance

of skin is blown back against the end of the barrel,

and that can leave an imprint.

Speaker 1: Based on ballistics, police know the killer used a twenty

two caliber pistol now forensic technician Ed Robinson hopes to

use the gunshot mark to zone in on the specific

make and model of the murder weapon.

Speaker 11: I was provided with photographs of one of the shooting

victims which depicted damage to the skin near the ear

of the hip. Looking at the photograph, I was fairly sure,

based on my original list of three firearms, that I

was going to be able to narrow it down to

one firearm. The process that I used was to put

a thin layer of clay on a styrofoam mannequin head

and then make impressions with various portions of the firearms

that I had previously listed. The process for the photography

was just to make everything one to one so that

all of the images were the same size.

Speaker 1: After several attempts to get to perfect match.

Speaker 11: I narrowed the list to raven pistols.

Speaker 1: Police get a list of raven owners, They compare it

to lists of corvette owners and sex offenders.

Speaker 3: Alt if we could compare all those lists together and

shift it and see what shook out the bottom whose

name appeared the most times and all those lists, that

was probably our suspect.

Speaker 1: Thirteen women dead and police still don't have a suspect.

As the death to arises, so does the fear in

the community.

Speaker 2: The pressure was really mounting, and so the public's awareness

was really amounting. Even though these women were viewed by

many as quote just prostitutes, it still was becoming an

issue of significant community concern.

Speaker 9: I think that the public was also afraid that it

was going to stem into like not just out on

Sprague with the prostitutes, if possibly he'd start killing off

other just quote unquote normal people.

Speaker 1: To police authorities respond to the public pressure, it.

Speaker 3: Formed a task force made up of detectives from the

city police Department, the Sheriff's Department, the Worsen State Patrol

who had participation from the FBI, as well as the

Worshan State Attorney General's office.

Speaker 1: The heightened attention triggers an overwhelming public response.

Speaker 2: Once the task force was formed, hotline was set up

and a lot of people were calling in their neighbors,

their friends, their ex boyfriends saying I think you gotta

take a look at this guy. And so in quick order,

the task force had a long list of people they

needed to look at.

Speaker 1: Despite the outpouring of tips, no credible suspects are put forward,

suggesting to police the killer is a master at blending

in cyril.

Speaker 3: Killer's trademark is their ability to manipulate those around them

into believing that they are nothing more than just a

regular human being.

Speaker 8: They don't stand out for any particular reason. They don't

look like Frankenstein or anything.

Speaker 1: The man who is killing prostitutes in cold blood could

even be a family man, someone his friends and neighbors

would never suspect, someone who's not likely to ever come

to the attention of police, someone with an iron clad cover.

With the murder count now at thirteen, law enforcement agencies

across the region joined together to catch the elusive Spokane

serial killer. Investigators believe they are chasing someone with an

iron clad cover, a killer with the ability to hide

in plane sight, but with no viable suspects, Police follow

up on the only concrete lead they have, the killer's

brand of weapon. They contact raven gun owners in the

area and bring their weapons in for testing.

Speaker 11: Twenty five auto caliber firearms were submitted to the crime

lab for test firing and microscopic comparison to the bullets

taken from the murder victims. All of the firearms that

were submitted were test fired into a water recovery system,

which allows for the collection of nearly pristine or pristine

bullets and the collection of the test fired cartridge cases.

The bullets were recovered and those test fires were microscopically

compared to the bullets.

Speaker 5: From the murder victims, but.

Speaker 1: No matches are made and the frustration wears hard on

the team.

Speaker 7: My biggest challenge in these cases was to have a

positive attitude that hopefully, this time we're going to find

something that's going to shut down this activity. And over

and over again that didn't happen. So it's frustrating.

Speaker 5: You can't sleep at night.

Speaker 3: You go to bed at ten o'clock, You wake up

at two, you turn the coffee pot on, You get

the books out, and you start reading about the case.

You can't put it away.

Speaker 1: Just when they're at their lowest, the killer throws another

sucker punch. The fourteenth victim is Linda Mabon, but this

time is different.

Speaker 4: The body had been dumped into a ditch and then

buried in the botanical debris. There was quite a lot

of it in forensic standards still on the site, enough

to tell that it did not match the local vegetation.

Speaker 1: After thoroughly examining the debris, forensic botanist Richard Old makes

an expert determination.

Speaker 4: The evidence that was dumped with the bodies was all

horticultural in nature. The site where it was dropped was

primarily exotic weeds and a few native plants.

Speaker 1: The debris provides another clue.

Speaker 3: There was no pine needles associated with it, and this

is largely a pine needle area.

Speaker 1: Instead, Old recognizes traces of Japanese maple oak and dark

bark chips.

Speaker 4: This was typical of horticultural material that would have fallen

in the fall, was deciduous vegetation.

Speaker 1: It's the kind of vegetation found in backyards.

Speaker 3: There's a lot of illegal dumping that goes on in

that area, typically from people getting rid of long clippings

and clean up the yards that sort of thing. But

no one would just put lawn debris on top of

bodies unless you were the killer.

Speaker 1: A killer who likes to keep his yard trim and tidy.

Based on the materials he found at the crime scene,

Richard Old sets about creating a picture of the killer's yard.

If he can find that yard, he can find the killer.

Speaker 4: That yard, that that material came from was out there someplace.

It was like a puzzle, and I wanted to solve it.

Speaker 1: Old knows that the debris came from a landscape garden

based on species type and natural proximity from tree to tree.

He begins to assemble a unique botanical fingerprint of the

killer's lair.

Speaker 4: What I am imagine the yard to look like was

two bark beds within fifty feet of each other based

on the amount of cross contamination, and I knew the

species composition of each of those bark beds. To know

the vegetation as well as knowing that there are two

separate bark beds made this a very unique location that

this material had come from. Normally, botanical evidence is used

after a perpetrator has been identified. In this case, we

had an opportunity to use the evidence to actually identify

the perpetrator.

Speaker 1: But legally they can't just walk into any yard to

check the flower beds. Instead, they develop an invaluable investigative tool.

Speaker 4: The detectives in the case put together a book of

the species that I found in the debris and use

this when they were visiting suspects homes to see if

that plant composition occurred on those sites.

Speaker 5: Obviously not the yard.

Speaker 1: In his lab, doctor Lindholm continues to pore over the bodies,

searching for any trace evidence the killer may have left behind.

Speaker 7: We do take sample, so the pubic hare off, we

com it, and we also pulled samples. Now on the

comb and the brushings. Debt you're looking for somebody else's

pubic hare is what you're looking for.

Speaker 1: Months of examination pays off. Lindholm manages to recover foreign

hair follicles from each of the victims.

Speaker 10: I analyzed the hairs and compared them and determined that

these pubicares did not match the.

Speaker 1: Victims, suggesting one thing, the pubic hairs belonged to the killer.

A DNA match to the semen sample recovered from Jennifer

Joseph's body confirms their suspicions.

Speaker 10: When I analyzed the pubic cares, I found them to

be light brown and likely from a Caucasian person.

Speaker 1: Armed with new information about their killer, investigators returned to

the track, this time with a new tactic. Undercover officers

pose as prostitutes. Every john is a potential suspect.

Speaker 6: We had instructed the certain officers who worked that downtown

corridor to look for evidence. It was pertinent to our investigations,

such as grocery or merchandise bags, small caliber weapon, and

specifically in any vehicle that might be capable of carrying

or conveying a body and a large amount of debris

in it.

Speaker 1: Even if there's nothing suspicious in the car, a john

is still fair game for closer inspection.

Speaker 6: Yeah, if a potential customer contacted them and agreed to

a sex act for money, that was constituted the crime

of soliciting prostitution, and they would be arrested. We would

get their identification, We would get fingerprints and palm prints

when they were booked that could be compared to.

Speaker 8: Information we already had.

Speaker 1: Trying to stay one step ahead of the killer, the

Task Force adopts a radical approach in dealing with missing persons.

Speaker 3: We learned real quickly in this investigation to treat all

missing persons, particularly females, as if they were homicide victim.

Speaker 1: A po least fear the worst. When a woman reports

that her roommate, Melody Murphin has gone missing. The local

prostitute was last seen leaving her house with a repeat customer,

someone she knew well, someone she trusted.

Speaker 9: It's not unusual to have repeat customers. I feel safe,

he feels safe. We know each other, we know it

or not. I'm not out to get him. He's not

out to get me. I'm not a cop.

Speaker 5: He's not a cop. Are you ready to go?

Speaker 1: The roommate describes the collar as white, middle aged with

brown hair. He fits their serial killer description to a

t A killer out there.

Speaker 2: Don't worry, I'll take.

Speaker 7: Care of her.

Speaker 3: Melody Murphins disappeared near Mother's Day. Although we had no

body with Melody, it was felt that she had been

killed because she wasn't around anymore.

Speaker 1: Investigators search the city streets and Spokane countryside, but they

find no trace of Melody Murphin.

Speaker 5: I get your name.

Speaker 1: Three weeks later, the case takes a dramatic turn when

police questioned local prostitute Christine Smith.

Speaker 8: I got hit with something.

Speaker 9: A good man, a black van pulled up and I

got into the van, and I had Since there was

a serial killer running around, I was trying to always

put up my feelers out to get any tuition on

whether or not the person was, you know, okay or not?

Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm good.

Speaker 9: I asked the customer if he was the serial killer.

Sure you're good, and he said that he was a

helicopter pilot with the Army National Guard. He was a

father of five. Now does that sound like a serial

killer to you. We proceeded to drive down the street

and I told him that I wanted to go to

my spot. He gave me forty dollars for oral sex

and nothing was really happening. He said, okay, like he

was talking to somebody else. I thought that I had

been hit in my head really hard by maybe a

ranch or or a crowbar. I jumped out of the

passenger seat, ran down the street, screaming to the top

of my lungs. My youngest daughters life is what flashed

before me, and that's what kept me from passing out.

And then I went into the elevator and I started

pushing buttons so that the elevator would keep the door closed,

hoping not to not see, you know, a hand come

in to open the elevator door, and an arm did

come through the elevator at one and I thought it was,

you know, the person that had just hit me, and

it turned out to be the security guard.

Speaker 1: After almost nine years and thirteen murders, can someone finally

put a face to the notorious Spokane serial killer? After

nine years of hunting the infamous Spokane serial killer, police

have a potential eye witness. Prostitute Christine Smith has survived

an attack with an aggressive John.

Speaker 9: Because it was a violent crime, the hospital said that

I had to make a police report.

Speaker 5: Do you have any idea where you were that's happened?

I don't.

Speaker 1: Smith describes the attack and reports that she was struck

in the head with a heavy blunt object.

Speaker 9: No, I don't remember anything.

Speaker 3: Christine Smith's case didn't fit the profile that we had

of our victims at that time.

Speaker 6: The most glaring discrepancy was the fact that she in

the kid, that she had been hit with something, struck

with a club or something different.

Speaker 3: All of our victims had been shot in the head.

We knew of none of them that had been physically assaulted.

Speaker 1: Back to square one, The elusive nature of the killer

continues to baffle police. Who is he and where is

he hiding?

Speaker 3: We had over seven thousand tips, which ultimately led to

about eighty thousand pages of investigative material. To clear those

seven thousand tips, It's so needle in a haystack.

Speaker 1: To cross reference, and filter the mountain of leads. Forensic

technicians turned to a new program called tip Man. From

seven thousand tips, Tipman narrows the field to just forty

four suspects.

Speaker 2: Most of these suspects when they were approached, if they

were truly innocent, they were rolling up their sleeves and

offering up their blood sample. And if they weren't guilty, bingo,

they walked.

Speaker 1: Closing in on a possible suspect, Police turn their attention

to finding the white Corvette.

Speaker 8: The corvette might disappear.

Speaker 6: I might find it in the woods, burned up after

it's been reported stolen, or any number of things which

will destroy evidence in it.

Speaker 1: One by one, investigators approached the forty four Corvette owners

on their list of suspects and search their vehicles.

Speaker 6: I took a number of samples from the interior carpeting

of the corvette in different areas.

Speaker 5: Here it is guys, have a look if you want.

Speaker 1: Nearing the end of the list, their search pays off.

The red carpet fibers strike an immediate cord with investigators.

Speaker 3: Those fibers were microscopically almost identical to the fibers that

were recovered from Jennifer Joseph's shoes and the towel that

are with her body.

Speaker 1: But there's a snag. The car owner only recently purchased

the Corvette.

Speaker 5: I got all the paperwork in that house.

Speaker 2: I can go get it if you want.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Now police have to track down the previous car owner

and bring them in for questioning. The Corvette is immediately impounded.

Speaker 5: As part of Burnelsis.

Speaker 10: We pretty much took the Corvette apart piece by piece.

On the interior of the vehicle.

Speaker 3: The vehicle was spotless. It was actually a real collector's car.

It was I would have loved to have owned a

car like that.

Speaker 1: The team quickly discovers a small white button encased in

the passenger floorboard.

Speaker 3: I recognized that button immediately as a button that I

had seen before.

Speaker 10: I compared it against the buttons that were still on

the Jennifer Joseph jacket.

Speaker 3: It was an identical match to the one that was

underneath this car seat.

Speaker 1: Despite the fact that the car had been professionally detailed,

the forensic team makes out a faint stain on the

passenger seat built Immediate DNA testing proves the blood belongs

to Jennifer Joseph. The evidence in the vehicle confirms what

investigators had earlier suspected. The killer viciously murdered Jennifer Joseph

then drove her lifeless body to the outskirts of Spokane,

dumping her in the countryside. Now police need a name

in connection to the car. Who was the previous owner

of the white Corvette. Police quickly learned that the car

was last registered to a helicopter pilot, a doting husband

and a father of five. The man's name Robert Yates.

Police move in to make an arrest.

Speaker 3: We picked a isolated section of highway in case the

worst case scenario happened. We weren't going to jeopardize those

people in the community.

Speaker 1: Got you that We're taking him down, possibly armed police

lead Nothing to chance.

Speaker 4: Robert Yanks.

Speaker 2: Let's see both hands out the window.

Speaker 5: Now on the car.

Speaker 1: On the ground.

Speaker 4: Now.

Speaker 1: When Yates fully complies with police, it begs one question.

In their desperate attempt to catch the Spokane serial killers

blood have investigators captured the wrong man After a decade

of slaughter. Spokane police arrest forty seven year old Robert

Lee Yates and charge him with murder. Investigators are convinced

they have finally found their killers. Now they need the

evidence to prove it. All units are dispatched to the

Yates family home.

Speaker 3: What I wanted to do is find the weapons in

the house first and foremost.

Speaker 10: I'm sorry to have to do this, but we have

a warrant to search the premises.

Speaker 5: Can you believe it?

Speaker 2: This guy's a war hero, He's a helicopter pilot, mister

average Spokane.

Speaker 5: He had five children and a wife.

Speaker 2: He'd been married, he'd been in the army, he'd been

in the Army, National Guard.

Speaker 5: It's unbelievable.

Speaker 1: A search of the house turns up nothing. Let's take

a look in the yard, hoping that Yates may have

buried his guns in the garden. Investigators move outdoors, but

again the search comes up cold. Forensic botanist Richard Old

is initially puzzled by the elaborate lands gaping in the backyard.

Speaker 5: It didn't work.

Speaker 4: It wasn't the way I had pictured it in my head.

Speaker 1: But a closer examination of the individual plant species draws

Old back to his original sketch.

Speaker 5: That's what I was saying.

Speaker 10: It's the stuff that we found in the field, right.

Speaker 1: He determines that most of the plants used to cover

Linda Maven's body are present, and yates his backyard, but

there is one glaring difference, the new red bark. He

covered the black bark with red chips.

Speaker 4: When I saw that old bark that I'd spent so

many hours digging through the hair on the back of

my neck just stood on end.

Speaker 1: Old's theory pays off in spades and fuels a search

for more evidence. When police discover a black van on

the property, they strip it for clues and turn up

a bullet fragment, but is it enough to guarantee a conviction.

Investigators are then approached by former prostitute Christine Smith. She

tells them about the recent visit that she made to

her doctor.

Speaker 9: He comes back into the room and he says, well,

miss Smith, you have the beginning of osteoarthritis in your neck,

but can you tell me.

Speaker 5: What year you were shot?

Speaker 1: X rays reveal bullet fragments lodged in the bone at

the base of Christine's skull. Her attacker didn't hit her

with a crowbar, as she had earlier believed. He shot

her point blank in the head.

Speaker 9: I was shot right here and it being that close

to my ear all you hear is an immense ringing.

Speaker 1: It's a miracle that Christine Smith survived the attack. The

fragments are removed from her skull and sent to the

ballistics lab for comparison.

Speaker 11: I was able to say that they were consistent in

design with the bullet that had been recovered from a

band where Christine Smith had.

Speaker 1: Been DNA testing will make or break the case. If

investigators can prove that the semen samples recovered from the

earlier victims belonged to Yates, they have their killer. The

DNA results are unmistakable. Robert Lee Yates is the Spokane

serial killer responsible for murdering fourteen women in Spokane County.

Speaker 3: I gotta tell you that I started to cry. I

sat at my desk and I cried. I was so

happy that we had finally done what we'd set out

to do.

Speaker 1: Stas agreement, but investigators aren't done with Yates. The prosecution

makes a deal. They'll waive the death penalty in exchange

for information. They suspect Yates is responsible for the disappearance

of Melody Murphin, the prostitute reported missing two years earlier.

Speaker 3: He drew on a little map that he gave to

his defense attorneys, and we follow his defense attorneys.

Speaker 1: From a helicopter thousands of feet in the air.

Speaker 4: Our own date.

Speaker 3: Mentally points to a house in South Spokane.

Speaker 1: The map leads them right back to the Yates family home.

Speaker 5: That's something here.

Speaker 6: We encountered a badly decomposed body that had obviously been

buried for some time. That body that had been buried

at mister Yates home for the better part of two

years was that of Melody Murphin.

Speaker 1: In a Spokane court room, Robert Lee Yates receives a

life sentence in a separate trial in Pierce County. There's

no obligation to honor Yates's plea bargain.

Speaker 2: Jury ultimately decided he should be put on death row

where where he still is today.

Speaker 5: I can tell you.

Speaker 3: That every one of those women were loved dearly by

somebody at some point in their life.

Speaker 1: A memorial service is held for all the victims, closure

for their families.

Speaker 9: Because the victims, even though they were prostitutes, they were

still mothers and utters and aunts and nieces and you know,

grandkids of people.

Speaker 2: H Assass