- FEMALE NARRATOR: They were
young lovers and friends searching for a place to fit in.
- RYAN SINNER: They were going to be on the adventure
of heading to start a life together.
- JASON SINNER: She was very excited about
what the future was going to be for her.
- NARRATOR: But a terrifying crime
would bring their adventures to an end.
- She obviously wasn't killed right away.
She was tortured.
- NARRATOR: In their search for answers,
investigators must piece together a complicated puzzle
of conflicting stories between two couples to determine who is
telling the truth and who is leading the conspiracy.
- He was a quasi, kind of a cult leader.
He liked to control people through fear.
- You knew there was more to the story.
- That's when the real torture started.
- STEVEN BERG: It just leaves you with an empty feeling.
It's hard to comprehend.
- [theme music]
- [muffled scream, gasp]
**
- NARRATOR: Densely forested and tucked in a remote corner
of northwestern California, the Trinity Alps Preserve is
the second-largest wilderness area in the state.
- DAVID KULZCYK: The Trinity Alps is a huge
wilderness area between Redding and the Pacific Coast.
It's massive in size.
- JANET BRESHEARS: It's very dark out there,
and if you go down the wrong road, there's trouble.
There's a lot of people
that actually live out there to kind of keep a distance
from law enforcement, make their own rules.
- It's a place where you can be by yourself and not be bothered.
- NARRATOR: On the morning of April 18th, 1998,
Shasta County authorities
receive a call about a derelict campsite.
- TERRISA CLEMENS: There was one tent standing.
You could see there had been
another tent there, but it had been removed.
- STEVEN: There was debris everywhere.
There were empty liquor bottles.
There was signs of possibly
a struggle or something that had taken place.
- TERRISA: There was dried blood all around,
and that's when then I was notified
to start a search warrant.
- The whole investigative unit was called in.
They sent the cadaver dog up
with its handler to the campsite,
and the dog immediately went to the firepit.
- NARRATOR: As the investigative unit
begins clearing debris, they make a horrific discovery.
- The police gently dug through
the fire pit, and eventually they found
a hand, and they discovered
a, uh, partially burnt body buried underneath the campfire.
- STEVEN: The victim was naked.
She had a black plastic,
like garbage bag tied around her head.
It definitely appeared that, uh,
she'd been struck several times in the back of the head.
She had bruising all over her body.
There were cuts on her arms.
- NARRATOR: Investigators immediately contact
the coroner's office for assistance.
- PAT LALAMA: The coroner estimates the body had been
there 10 to 15 days, but it was in
really good condition for investigative purposes.
It was inside the fire pit
covered by wood, so it was not disturbed
by wildlife or any environmental elements.
- NARRATOR: While the body is removed for autopsy,
authorities continue processing the scene for clues.
- STEVEN: One of the pieces of evidence that we've located
in the campsite was a small purse.
And inside the small purse was a driver's license identifying
a person by the name of Lora Sinner.
Even though she matched the picture
on the driver's license, we wanna make 100% sure.
- NARRATOR: Detectives will have to wait for dental records
to confirm their victim's identity.
In the meantime,
the driver's license is the only hint they have.
Born on October 25, 1977, Lora Sinner grew up
on a dairy farm near Yakima, Washington,
the youngest of three siblings.
- RYAN SINNER: Lora, as a young girl, was just fun.
She was cute.
She was always smiling and seemed, like, happy.
Even when her two big brothers were picking on her.
- NARRATOR: When Lora was eight, her parents divorced.
Still, Lora always appreciated the value in family.
As she got older, she yearned to help those who had none.
- RYAN: I remember Lora's high school days.
She volunteered a lot with our mom.
- JASON SINNER: My mom was very into religion and church
and brought us up as a Christian family.
It was a big part of our life.
- RYAN: Mom started doing foster care.
She was working in some care giving fields,
and then one of her friends, uh,
they were fostering some children
and my mom that, you know, she could--we had room.
Why not?
We got this little boy named Joshua.
- JASON: My sister really took
a liking to Joshua, and that became a big part of her life.
She enjoyed helping others,
and that was kind of her Christian spirit to help others.
It was just her personality.
- NARRATOR: Following her freshman year of college,
Lora spent the summer of 1997
volunteering at a Christian mission in Aberdeen, Washington.
There, Lora would meet the love of her life.
- RYAN: There was a young man
that, uh, had come through the food line,
and she kind of noticed that he kept coming through.
And it was this young man named Tim.
- DAVID KULZCYK: Tim Smith was from Redding, California.
He had moved up to Washington State for a change
in life when he ended up meeting Lora.
Tim was so smitten by her that he started volunteering
at the mission so he could get to know her better.
They were quite happy with each other.
- RYAN: Lora definitely liked Tim.
She always wanted to be around him.
- So she went through the things
that we all go through when we, you know,
meet our first love.
- NARRATOR: By the end of summer, however,
the budding romance hit a rough patch.
- He didn't have any money, was
always begging for money from my sister.
He just didn't seem to have any drive.
- They ended up breaking up, and it broke Lora's heart.
- NARRATOR: Less than two months later, Lora suffered another
devastating blow when her mother fell ill.
- She went into the doctor
for that and found out that she had leukemia.
And it quickly progressed.
- She went into the hospital
October 8th and died on the 31st.
So, it was like a couple weeks
of not knowing she was ill to she's gone.
Mom was Lora's life.
It devastated Lora. She kind of lost it.
"Where do I go? What direction do I go?"
It really threw her for a loop.
- NARRATOR: To ease the pain,
Lora sought the comfort of her former flame, Tim Smith.
- RYAN: I think Lora was emailing him.
She had reached out to him, and somehow he figured out how
to get her to take him back to where his family was from.
And that's where I found out
that Redding, California, was, like, his hometown.
- And that's where she started developing this,
"Well, maybe we could go to California," or make a change
in her life so that she could become a happier person.
She saw this opportunity with Tim to try something different.
- NARRATOR: In March of 1998,
Lora and Tim packed their belongings into Lora's car
and headed south to visit Tim's father in Redding, California.
- She said that they love each other.
They're going to go down,
meet his family, get married, you know, start a life there.
I mean, she was 20.
You know, that's kind of what 20-year-olds do.
- NARRATOR: But Lora's happy ever after
would come to an untimely end.
Only one month after she arrived
in California, police believe they have found
her body at a campsite in the Trinity Alps wilderness.
- STEVEN: We did ultimately find
family-sized large can of chili beans
that had hair and blood evidence, and it was dented.
- PAT: Police suspect that this
can was actually used as a weapon on the victim.
And with the amount of force
taken to make this kind of dent, you can only imagine the level
of rage and anger that was behind it.
- NARRATOR: Coming up,
as police dig deeper into their victim's life, her family
leads them to someone with opportunity.
- JANET: Knowing that he was her ex-boyfriend,
he was the one that brought her to the area,
he was certainly a person of interest.
- NARRATOR: But a tell-all confession
shifts investigators' attention from one couple
to refocus on two couples.
- She came forward to tell investigators
that she had information about Lora's death.
- NARRATOR: In April 1998,
police have discovered the brutalized remains
of a young woman at an abandoned campsite.
- Dental records were requested, and when they received those
dental records, we were positively able
to identify the victim as Lora Sinner.
As the autopsy was conducted, it was ultimately determined
that the cause of death was a massive blunt force trauma.
Also, the coroner's report stated
that the blood alcohol level was .78.
The legal limit for being under the influence of alcohol is .08.
When a person gets to the area of .4 to .5,
they are generally completely incapacitated.
And anything beyond that,
there's an extreme possibility of death,
either through alcohol poisoning or just your body shutting down.
- DAVID: The coroner said that someone would have to be
forced to drink that much alcohol,
because it's physically not possible to do it on yourself.
- TERRISA: It's terribly shocking.
She obviously wasn't killed right away.
She was tortured.
- STEVEN: We contacted Lora's father in Salem
to advise him that, uh, we had located her body
and that she was deceased.
- RYAN: "Are you sure? Are you sure it's her?
"I mean, come on. She's too nice.
Who would do this?" I mean, she'd give you the shoes
off her feet, the shirt off her back, her last dollar.
Like, it's just not possible.
- JASON: We were just devastated as a family.
My father was crushed.
It was hard for him to live with,
hearing that that happened to his daughter.
- NARRATOR: Lora's father tells investigators that he had been
worried about his daughter ever since she moved to California
with her boyfriend, Tim Smith, nearly five weeks earlier.
- STEVEN: He was so concerned because he hadn't heard from his
daughter from the time she left and moved to Redding
that he contacted the Salem Police Department
and reported her as a missing person.
Shortly after that, he received a phone call from her.
- PAT: Lora had called her father
to inform him that Tim had actually broken up with her.
- JASON: On March 27th,
I emailed my sister and I said, "I'm concerned.
"I know that Tim and you have broken up
"and I want to help you, and if there's something going
on and you need help, let me know."
- STEVEN: The offer was made by her father to give her money
for gas so she could return to Salem.
She declined those offers
and said that she did want to stay in Redding.
- PAT: Lora's father told
investigators that the last he spoke to his daughter was
on April 1st, and he hadn't heard from her
since then, and he just assumed that she stayed in Redding and
that she and Tim were just trying to work things out.
- Knowing that Tim was her ex-boyfriend,
he was the one that brought her to the area,
he was certainly a person of interest.
- NARRATOR: Law enforcement
locate Tim Smith in Redding and take him into custody.
- We brought Tim into major crimes and interviewed him.
- PAT: When police eventually confront Tim and let him know
that Lora had been murdered, he seems legitimately shocked.
He insists he knows nothing of what happened to her
and that the last time he had seen her was March 30th.
- NARRATOR: According to Tim,
two weeks after arriving in California,
he broke up with Lora following a series of arguments.
- He described the relationship that he and Lora had
and how it changed after they got down to Redding.
- Tim explained that a very short time later, they split up.
Lora decided to stay
and she was staying at his father's house
due to the fact that she actually became friends
with Tim's family.
- STEVEN: She met Tim's brother, Paul.
Tim's sister, Lori, her boyfriend, Eric Rubio.
They all seemed to get along.
- DAVID: Lori and Lora had a fairly instant connection
with each other, and Lora wanted Lori to be
her maid of honor when she married Tim.
Lori felt very close to Lora
and, uh, once told her that she was like the sister
that she had never had.
- PAT: When Tim and Lora broke up,
she really had nowhere to go, so she asked Paul and Lori
if she could come and live with them.
Tim decided he would just keep his distance
and let Lora have her space.
- She was excited about these friendships
where she had been alone.
She had very little in her life after her mother died.
- NARRATOR: When police ask Tim about the last time he spoke
to Lora, he claims it's been nearly three weeks.
He explains he doesn't spend much time
with his younger siblings, 20-year-old Paul Jr.
and 18-year-old Lori,
because they didn't always see eye to eye.
- It became very apparent this was a dysfunctional family.
- NARRATOR: Tim tells police that from a young age,
he and his siblings had never had a real place to call home.
- The kids spent most of their time in foster care,
bouncing around from one place to another.
They weren't always together.
- It did appear that Tim had moved away,
started a productive life, was moving forward.
Paul wasn't able to do that.
He was in the system, continually in the system,
and really struggled to lead a productive life.
- STEVEN: Even after he got out and became an adult,
he continued this type of activity.
He was a car thief, burglar, and was involved with that
kind of way to support himself rather than get a real job.
- DAVID: The sister, Lori, had her own problems in foster care
and ended up in juvenile hall a few times, also.
In late 1997,
the family all reconnected and lived
underneath Paul Sr's roof in Redding, California.
The brothers hadn't seen their sister Lori in years.
She was almost a stranger,
but she reconnected, especially with Paul Jr.
- JANET: Once they reunited, basically as adults,
they became very close. They clung to each other.
- NARRATOR: Tim tells police that Lori began dating
one of Paul's best friends, 19-year-old Eric Rubio.
At the same time,
Paul met a 14-year-old girl named Amy Stevens.
- My understanding that Amy Stevens was a runaway,
that she'd been in the foster care system and she had ran away
at this point and that she was
now hanging out with Paul Smith as, quote, a boyfriend.
- Paul convinced her to run away from the foster home
and move in with him, which she, in fact, did.
She idolized him.
He was everything to her.
- NARRATOR: Tim says he hasn't seen his siblings since
he and Lora Sinner broke up three weeks earlier.
Now that Lora has been found murdered,
he suggests police should immediately find
and question them about the last time they saw Lora.
- JANET: When interviewing Tim,
I really, truly felt he was a good guy.
I felt he was actually very worried and that possibly
some responsibility,
since he's the one that brought her down here.
Obviously,
you still have that thing in the back of your mind,
there's a possibility, but he was very cooperative.
- NARRATOR: As detectives continue to gather information
from Tim, they receive a surprise visit
from Paul Jr's girlfriend, Amy Stevens.
- I'd received a walk-in report of a juvenile
who stated that she was hooked up with an adult
and he was on a crime spree. She was scared.
- PAT: Amy came forward to tell
investigators that she had information about Lora's death.
- NARRATOR: In Redding, California,
police are investigating the murder of Lora Sinner
when 14-year-old Amy Stevens comes forward
and claims she knows who killed her.
When investigators sit down
with Amy, she tells them she had recently met Lora through her
20-year-old boyfriend, Paul Smith, when Paul and his
sister Lori offered Lora a place to stay.
- DAVID: There was two couples
with Eric and Lori and Amy and Paul.
She said Lora was kind of disruptive to the group.
She was the fifth wheel.
- STEVEN: She felt that there were times when Lora
seemed to be flirting with Paul.
It seemed like Paul would flirt back with her as well.
And this agitated Amy.
- NARRATOR: Amy tells investigators
that on April 7th, the group decided to travel
to the Trinity Alps for a camping trip.
- PAT: Paul had invited
Lora Sinner to join the two couples on the camping trip.
Now, Amy admits that she was not happy about that at all.
But they set up camp and they
were having a good time hanging out.
But later in the evening, Lora started flirting with Paul.
- DAVID: She said that Lora had kissed Paul
and she got very angry.
- She actually ran up to Lora, punched her in the face.
At that point, Lora was able to physically push
Amy back, and the two of them fell down on the ground.
And then Lora was on top of Amy.
- She told police that then Paul stepped in.
- Amy described that Paul had grabbed a can,
hit Lora in the head.
- NARRATOR: Amy tells investigators
she was terrified by what Paul did next.
- She described that Paul had grabbed a dent puller.
- Dent puller is a device used
by body repair people to pull dents out of a car.
Has a heavy end to it, and he beat her with that.
- Eventually, Paul struck her to the point
where Lora was no longer responsive.
- NARRATOR: According to Amy, she was angry when Lora tried
to kiss her boyfriend, but she had never meant for her to die.
Fearful of Paul, she had stayed quiet about the murder,
but her conscience had weighed on her and she
decided she needed to come clean to police.
- JANET: I truly felt sympathy for this young juvenile.
She was scared.
She just wanted to report this.
She wanted something done to Paul Jr.
And I thought her motives were pure for reporting it.
- NARRATOR: Amy confirms that Lora's ex-boyfriend,
Tim Smith, was not present at the time
of the murder, eliminating him as a person of interest.
After telling her story,
Amy puts investigators in touch with 18-year-old Lori Smith.
- Lori went to speak with investigators,
knowing that Amy had done the same thing herself.
- NARRATOR: According to Lori, Lora Sinner had driven her,
Eric Rubio, Paul Smith, and Amy Stevens
to the Trinity Alps campsite on the afternoon of April 7th.
- STEVEN: Lori then explained
that ultimately, ah, Paul got angry about it.
- TERRISA: Smith said that she
was not helping because Paul had threatened to kill them.
- DAVID: Then he put a bag over her head
and beat her more with the dent puller.
- STEVEN: After they left the campsite,
Paul had told everyone involved that if they said anything,
that he would kill them or have them killed.
Lori really believed it.
She was an absolute fear of Paul carrying this out,
so she hadn't said anything.
- NARRATOR: Lori Smith's account
of the murder ends the same way as Amy Stevens'.
But investigators noticed some
discrepancies between the two stories.
- The biggest difference was
that Amy admitted that she initiated the physical contact.
- Lori Smith blamed everything on her brother, Paul Smith,
and said that he was the one that injured and assaulted
and then eventually murdered Lora Sinner.
- STEVEN: The fact that their stories were that much different
made us think we aren't even close to what really took place.
- NARRATOR: Detectives have to wonder, are Amy and Lori
telling the truth about Paul, or are the girls hiding their
own motives for wanting Lora Sinner dead?
- You knew there was more to the story.
- They decided it was worth investigating Eric and Paul,
who is pretty much a loose cannon and a violent person.
- NARRATOR: Coming up, in search of the truth,
investigators get a new perspective,
forcing them to reconsider who is the crime's true mastermind.
- JANET: There was lots of contradictory statements.
Everybody wanting to distance themselves.
At no point did I see any remorse.
- NARRATOR: In Redding, California,
detectives are searching for two men in connection
with the brutal murder of 20-year-old Lora Sinner.
Both Lori Smith and Amy Stevens have confessed that their
boyfriends, Eric Rubio and Paul Smith Jr.
were involved.
On April 18th, detectives track the men down.
- STEVEN: Lori advised us
that she'd received calls from Paul Smith, who was in custody.
We checked the arrest log
and determined that, in fact, Paul Smith and Eric Rubio were
both currently in custody on a car theft arrest.
- TERRISA: What they were doing
were going out, they were trying to steal vehicles,
and that's what eventually put Paul Smith and Eric into jail
was they got caught with a stolen Jeep.
- STEVEN: With the information we had already received
talking to the girls, we decided Paul was probably
the most responsible about everything took place,
so we felt it would be better to talk to Rubio first.
- NARRATOR: Faced with possible jail time,
Eric finally decides to come clean.
- STEVEN: We asked him what he
could describe took place out at the campsite.
He was reasonably candid.
- DAVID: Eric described their campsite
as not a really happy place.
There was a lot of drug taking and drinking going on,
and flirting going on, and tension was rising in the camp.
- NARRATOR: According to Eric,
the source of both couples' tension was Lora Sinner.
- Eric said that due to the fact that Lora was an outsider,
she was really getting on everybody's nerves.
- STEVEN: Rubio described to us
that Amy initially assaulted Lora,
punched her in the face, knocked her against a tree.
The two of them fell to the ground,
and they were wrestling on the ground.
Lora started to get advantage on Amy.
- Lori jumped into it because it was believed that
Lora Sinner was winning.
So they all fight.
- STEVEN: Amy went over,
retrieved this two-pound can of chili beans,
and then came over and struck
Lora in the back of the head two times.
- NARRATOR: Unlike Lori's statement
that Paul was the initial aggressor,
Eric claims that the two girls were the first ones
who used the can of chili to beat Lora Sinner.
- Lori then stepped in, took the can from her,
because Amy wasn't strong enough to really do any damage.
And then Lori struck her multiple times in the head
to the point where Lora finally
collapsed on the ground and they stopped.
- STEVEN: According to Rubio,
the two girls helped Lora up and walked down to the creek,
which is about 20 yards away from the campsite.
They started rinsing off Lora's head in the water,
and it was at that point they
could see that the skull was crushed.
- NARRATOR: When the girls returned to the campsite,
they left Lora to rest against a tree.
Eric claims that's when Paul produced a razor blade.
- DAVID: She didn't want to do it.
She made some, some cuts into her wrists
that weren't very deep, which angered Paul.
- That's when the real torture started.
- STEVEN: At that point,
Paul took the razor blade from her, made the cuts more deeply.
Lora was still crying out,
"Why are you doing this?" She wasn't dying.
- At one point, Paul grabs a bottle of whiskey,
puts it in front of Lora's face, and tells her she's got to drink
the thing because he doesn't want her to feel any more pain.
But she drinks practically the entire bottle.
- DAVID: Eric and Amy were inside the tent,
trying not to hear the sound of Lora's murder just happening
just feet away from them, outside of the tent.
"Finally, we heard a snap.
That was her neck being broken."
- This poor girl was in agony,
extreme pain and unbelievable fear
for a very long period of time.
It's hard to comprehend.
It just leaves you with an empty feeling.
- NARRATOR: Unlike Amy and Lori's statements,
Eric's account implicates Lori
in the bludgeoning of Lora Sinner.
- JANET: There was lots of contradictory statements,
everybody wanting to distance themselves.
- NARRATOR: But all three accounts say the same man
delivered the fatal blows.
Now, detectives turn their attention
to the alleged killer, Paul Smith Jr.
- DAVID: It was finally time for the police
to talk to Paul Smith.
So he told the police,
just kind of offhandedly "Yeah, I'll take the blame for this."
- NARRATOR: Police have interviewed three suspects
for the brutal murder of 20-year-old Lora Sinner
at a remote campsite in northern California.
Amy Stevens, Lori Smith,
and Eric Rubio all say that 20-year-old Paul Smith Jr.
is the real killer.
As detectives listen,
Paul corroborates Eric's account that the fight had started
between the three girls and ended with Paul.
- STEVEN: In his mind, Lora was not going to live.
Her skull was crushed, and that,
in fact, she would eventually die.
Then he decided he didn't really want her to suffer.
He described hitting her
in the neck several times, and then at some point,
he described that he did hear a snap.
- Paul told police that he gave each one of his friends
an assignment to help him clean up the crime scene.
- Paul was the type who,
it appeared to me, needed an entourage of people
to look up to him, think he was their protector.
He was the bad man, not afraid of anything.
- He was a quasi,
kind of a cult leader type person, his personality.
He liked to control people through fear.
- JANET: That's why he surrounds
himself with young people, people that he could intimidate.
Amy was in foster care, ran away from foster care.
Obviously, Lori Smith had a dysfunctional childhood.
Eric Rubio had a dysfunctional childhood,
had no one he could really count on.
- STEVEN: He threatened everyone
around him once they were close to him.
This guy was absolutely the worst of the worst.
- But ultimately, all of them were involved in it.
And at no point did I see any remorse on the two girls.
- TERRISA: It's like that pack of dogs.
If you have one dog that's a little bit more aggressive,
then next thing you know, everybody's attacking.
- NARRATOR: Less than three weeks after Lora's death,
Paul Smith, Lori Smith,
Amy Stevens, and Eric Rubio are all indicted for her murder.
- In my 30 years of law enforcement,
I don't recall ever arresting
multiple couples involved with a murder.
- NARRATOR: On July 10th, 1999,
Lori Smith pleads guilty to murder.
Eleven days later,
her now fiancé, Eric Rubio, does the same.
- TERRISA: Eric Rubio and Lori Smith made a deal
with the District Attorney's Office to testify against
Paul Smith, and that's where they did get a reduced sentence.
- STEVEN: They were sentenced then to 15 years to life,
with the possibility of parole.
Amy being a juvenile, she went to juvenile court,
but she was sentenced to the maximum for a juvenile,
which would mean she would be in custody until she was 25.
- NARRATOR: In 2002,
four years after Lora's murder,
Paul Smith Jr. finally goes on trial.
On the stand, he maintains his original statement
that his girlfriend Amy and his sister Lori
were the first to attack Lora Sinner.
- DAVID: Paul Smith testified
that he had only put Lora Sinner out of her misery
because he felt she was going to die anyways from the injuries.
That was his defense, that he had done her a favor.
- STEVEN: The jury obviously didn't buy into that theory,
and Paul Smith was eventually
convicted on the charges that were brought against him.
- He was sentenced to death row.
- JANET: I think justice was served for Paul Jr.
I don't think justice was served in regards to Amy and Lori.
Is it enough for Lora Sinner's family?
Wouldn't be enough for me.
- RYAN: There's nothing I can say to any one of them.
We've lost our sister,
and it hurts 20-some years later like it was yesterday.
Lora deserved better.
- JASON: Lora really trusted people
and saw the good in people, and they took advantage
of Lora's goodwill and good nature.
- Here was an innocent girl
that got caught up with the wrong type of people,
that it ultimately cost her her life.
And that's the saddest thing there is.
- I Love you, Lora.
I miss you, and see you soon.
- *